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Chapter Text

Of the many adventures which befell my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes, there are some I have never set to paper. One such affair I now take up with reluctance, urged by the fear that, were I to remain silent much longer, the recollection might pass with me into oblivion, leaving no record of what we endured upon that desolate shore.

The years have marched on since then, yet the very thought of that volcanic coast, of its blackened crags and monstrous shapes of nature, is enough to chill my blood. Often in dreams I hear again the cry of seabirds wheeling overhead, or feel the unsteady ground beneath my feet, and I wake in the darkness with a start.

Holmes himself has never spoken of it to me since. Once, when I ventured to allude to the ordeal, he waved the matter aside with a curt shake of the head, as though it lay outside the boundaries of reason. And yet it was precisely reason—the cold, piercing reason which was his gift—that saved us both when all else had failed.

If I set it down at last in this private diary, it is simply to discharge a private burden. Whether it be read or forgotten, it matters little to me. I wish only to mark upon the page, for my own conscience, the events which cast us upon that unholy island of the Pacific, and the dreadful crimes we witnessed there.

It was in the early spring of ’89 that the letter came to Baker Street. I found Holmes at the breakfast table, the air thick with the blue haze of his tobacco, a sheaf of correspondence spread before him. He was dispatching circulars and bills with the same brisk indifference he might have given to pawns in a chess game.

“An endless parade of tradesmen, Watson,” he remarked, flicking one aside. “I sometimes think the postman knows me only as a debtor.”

“A fate you share with half of London,” said I, seating myself opposite.

Among the heap lay a thick cream envelope, its red seal stamped with the arms of the Royal Society. Holmes’s hand hovered over it for a moment longer than the rest, as though he had already divined its weight.

“Not a tradesman, at any rate,” I observed.

He cracked it open with a quick flick of the thumb, and as his eye ran down the page, the familiar mask of impassivity gave way to unmistakable animation. He tapped the paper twice against the table, a spark kindling in his expression.

“It appears, Watson,” said he, “that we are invited to tread in the footsteps of Charles Darwin himself.”

The letter proved to be from Professor Huxley himself, that stalwart defender of Darwin’s creed. With a flourish worthy of the stage, Holmes read a few lines aloud, his voice quickening as he went.

“A naval officer, lately returned from the Pacific, reports the sighting of a bird unknown to science. Its description is so singular that it must be either a prodigious discovery—or an imposture.”

He looked up at me, eyes alight. “Huxley begs me to accompany a scientific party to the Galápagos archipelago, to decide the matter. Who better, he says, to distinguish fact from embellishment than a mind trained in detection?”

“The Galápagos!” I exclaimed. “Darwin’s islands of tortoise and finch. I had not thought, Holmes, that you counted yourself a man of expeditions.”

He tapped the letter against the table, a rare smile tugging at his mouth. “My good Watson, the whole art of detection rests upon the close observation of trifles. What are Darwin’s finches but Nature’s most delicate testimony? To study them is not diversion, but a lesson in method itself.”

I shook my head, half in amusement. “And here I thought you had no taste for anything without a criminal in it.”

“Perhaps Nature is the greatest criminal of all,” he returned dryly, “for she leaves her clues scattered in plain sight, and still men fail to read them.”

His enthusiasm was contagious, though of a different sort than mine. For him it was the prospect of method and evidence; for me, the salt air and open horizon. I will admit a wanderlust long suppressed stirred at the thought. London had been heavy upon me of late—my practice quiet, my spirits languid, the fog seeping into the very marrow of my bones. To exchange that endless gray for the sunlit Pacific seemed, at first blush, a reprieve. Yet beneath my eagerness stirred a quieter doubt, as though I had signed a bargain whose cost I had not counted.

“You see, Watson,” Holmes said, folding the letter with a decisive snap, “we need only follow the logic of tides and currents rather than those of rascals and their crimes.”

“And pray,” I returned, “that the one proves no less perilous than the other.”

He chuckled, but there was a glint in his eye that suggested he did not wholly disagree.

So it was settled with remarkable ease. Within a fortnight the arrangements were made, and on a brisk morning we stood side by side upon the deck of the Argus. The smoke of the Thames curled into the low sky as the river broadened and the familiar shores slipped astern. Ahead lay the ocean—vast, untried, and brimming with promise, though even then I could not decide whether it beckoned us forward or waited to swallow us whole. A gull wheeled above us, its cry thin and harsh against the wind, and I remember thinking it less a farewell than a warning.

The first days of the voyage were consumed by the endless adjustments of life at sea. The Argus was a stout three-masted vessel, her decks smelling of tar and salt, her timbers groaning like a living thing whenever the swell caught her broadside. Lanterns swung above the narrow passages with a ceaseless creak, and the crash of waves against her hull became our constant music.

My own constitution, never friendly to the tossing of a vessel, rebelled at once. I passed the better part of a week in a state of queasy resignation, the sea pressing upon me as though intent on proving its dominion. Holmes, on the other hand, seemed immune. He paced the deck with his long strides, pausing at the rail to watch gulls wheel overhead or to measure the shifting colour of the water with that intense gaze of his.

When the motion left me pale and unsteady, he set aside his vigils to turn physician in his own fashion. A steady hand at my elbow guided me to a bench beneath the quarterdeck awning, where he arranged my rug with the precision of a surgeon laying out instruments. Into my palm he pressed a biscuit or flask of cordial—though he himself had no appetite—and remained beside me until the trembling eased. At night, when the timbers groaned and the lanterns guttered, I would hear the scratch of his match as he lit the lamp, or feel him lean close with some dry observation meant to draw me back from misery.

Once I caught the curve of a smile upon his face in that wavering light, softer than I had ever seen it, as though my wretchedness stirred not amusement but something gentler. It heartened me then, though in recollection it has the poignancy of a lantern flaring before the storm. Thus, between jest and solicitude, he contrived to make my convalescence less intolerable than it might otherwise have been. 

By the time I was steadier on my feet, I could take fuller stock of our surroundings. For so small a company of passengers the Argus seemed almost excessive in her accommodations, but the reason soon declared itself. Her holds were crammed not only with the merchant’s trade goods but with the formidable impedimenta of science—crates of jars and specimen boxes, bales of netting, cumbersome tripods, and gleaming brass contrivances bound for the islands. She was less a passenger ship than a floating laboratory, and the serious air of purpose lent our voyage a character quite apart from any pleasure-cruise.

The plan was to touch at the Galápagos only briefly, setting the naturalists ashore to pursue their researches while the vessel pressed on to Callao and Valparaíso. Holmes and I were to remain behind among the volcanic crags until the return voyage should lift us home again.

Our fellow passengers formed a curious set: two eager young naturalists, scarcely out of their student days; an elderly clergyman whose lungs had driven him to warmer climes; and a merchant of sombre aspect whose goods lay stowed below. Holmes found easy amusement in conversation with the naturalists, whose fervour for beetles and birds matched, in its way, his own zeal for crime. More than once I observed him cross-examine them on their methods, smiling faintly when their conclusions rested upon careless observation. They, for their part, looked on him with mingled admiration and unease, uncertain whether he jested or spoke in deadly earnest.

When not engaged in debate, he contrived small experiments with the meagre tools at hand. I came upon him one afternoon crouched upon the deck, a spyglass in one hand and a battered notebook in the other, charting the flight of storm-petrels that haunted our wake. To Holmes there was no such thing as idleness—only opportunities for reason to sharpen itself.

One afternoon a cry from the fo’c’sle drew us to the rail, where a sodden carcass drifted in our wake—some great fish, torn open by teeth larger than any I had seen. The sea rocked it gently, as though cradling its own dead. A murmur passed among the sailors, and more than one made the sign of the cross. Holmes watched in silence, but his eyes narrowed, as though he marked it not as omen but as clue.

As for myself, I was content with quieter pursuits. Wrapped against the salt wind, I would sit aft with a book or scribble notes, though more often than not my writing dissolved into fragments of discomfort. Yet even so, I felt at times a quickening exhilaration: the vastness of sea and sky, the rolling majesty of the waves, and the sense that we were carried ever farther from London into some uncharted realm.

But exhilaration at sea is never unalloyed. The immensity that thrilled me by day pressed heavily at night. When the timbers creaked and the stars burned cold above us, a hush fell upon the vessel that set my nerves on edge. I marked then a restlessness in Holmes’s manner. He would stand long at the prow, the glow of his cigarette faint in the dark, as though the sea held some enigma he meant to solve.

It was during those vigils that the captain began to mutter of changing winds and heavy weather. Holmes, with a glance at the barometer and the tautening lines, seemed inclined to agree. I, for my part, little guessed how swiftly those mutterings would be justified.

The saloon of the Argus was a narrow chamber, panelled in dark wood and lit by lamps that groaned with every tilt of the sea. The air was thick with boiled beef, lamp oil, and damp wool, while the cutlery slid faintly upon the cloth whenever the vessel pitched. Each evening we gathered there, a little company bound more by circumstance than inclination.

The naturalists, scarcely out of their student days, filled the air with chatter, tumbling one over another to recount marvels of plumage and chitin. Opposite them the clergyman, hollow of chest and pale of face, nodded drowsily over his soup, roused only when a violent roll of the ship jolted him upright with a muttered prayer. The merchant ate in grim silence, his shoulders hunched, jaw working steadily as though the plate itself were the only matter of consequence.

In that close and restless space Holmes proved a curious foil to the younger men. At first he listened with apparent courtesy, fingers steepled beneath his chin, until some incautious boast betrayed their reliance upon memory. Then came the narrowing of his eyes, and with it a question as deft as a conjurer producing a coin.

“Had you measured precisely?” he asked one, who had just extolled the iridescent throat of a hummingbird glimpsed in South America. “What allowance was made for the dimness of the light—or the angle at which the feathers caught the sun? How did you determine it was the bird itself, and not the accident of circumstance, that produced so vivid a hue?”

The youth faltered, colour rising in his cheeks. His companion, eager to rescue him, confessed they had trusted recollection rather than record.

Holmes’s chuckle was low, though not unkind. “Recollection, gentlemen, is the most treacherous of instruments. More reputations have foundered upon memory than upon any reef in the Pacific. A note taken in the instant is worth a hundred recollections after dinner.”

At the word foundered the clergyman stirred, clutching his napkin. “God preserve us from reefs,” he muttered, his eyes darting toward the swaying lamps before sinking back into uneasy silence.

The merchant set down his knife with a deliberate clatter. “Must we dine under cross-examination?” he demanded, his voice roughened by years of bargaining. “I came for my supper, sir, not to be lectured like a schoolboy.”

Holmes raised his glass in a gesture half apology, half provocation. The gleam in his grey eyes was unmistakably mischievous, yet behind it I thought I glimpsed a harder glint. “As you wish,” said he lightly, and drank. His glance flicked toward me with the faintest quirk of a smile, as if to ask whether he had pressed too far.

Conversation limped on after that, subdued. The naturalists whispered together, chastened. The clergyman crossed himself whenever the lamps swayed too violently. The merchant chewed with dour determination, as though the act of eating itself were a battle not to be lost.

I observed them with some curiosity, struck by how the confinement of that swaying cabin stripped each man bare in a way London drawing-rooms never could: the naturalists’ confidence already fragile, the clergyman’s piety shot through with fear, the merchant’s silence heavy with some private discontent.

Holmes’s eyes lingered on the last more than once. Yet when I pressed him in private, he only laughed softly, the smoke from his pipe wreathing upward, and gave no answer.

Later that night, as I made my way back along the narrow passage, I caught two sailors muttering beyond the half-closed door of the galley. One spoke of the voyage as “ill-starred,” the other swore the merchant’s cargo was cursed, though what he meant I could not hear. At my approach they fell abruptly silent, and I was left with only the rattle of pans and the uneasy weight of their glances.

Our cabin was scarcely wide enough for two men to turn about in, all polished wood and brass fittings meant to give an air of refinement to what was, at bottom, a wooden box tossed upon the sea. The lamp swung overhead, throwing long restless shadows, and every creak of the timbers reminded us that we were not alone in the world but borne along at the mercy of wind and tide. 

We might have taken two cabins—there were enough to spare—but we told ourselves it was prudent to economise. The truth was simpler: neither of us wished to be shut away from the other. And so in that narrow space it seemed, for a little while, that we had stepped outside the notice of all others.

Holmes sat on the edge of my bunk, knees and elbows sharp in the cramped quarters, the violin case at his shoulder though he had never once touched it since sailing. He spoke eagerly of the archipelago ahead—the finches whose varied beaks had unsettled centuries of thought, the monstrous tortoises said to outlive generations of men, the lava fields black as pitch where even the air was rumoured to shimmer with heat. His eyes shone with an intensity I could not quite call joy; it was a fiercer hunger, the lure of evidence.

“For my part,” I said when he paused for breath, “I should be content simply to set foot on solid ground again, whether it hold a finch or no.”

He smiled, but his gaze flicked back to me, measuring. “You will have what you need? If the pain should seize you ashore—will you manage?”

“My bag is in order,” I said, steadying myself with the old doctor’s tone. “Laudanum if need be, and the salves for the joints. A day’s rest is usually enough.”

Holmes gave a small huff, not entirely appeased. “You place more faith in pacing than I should, faced with volcanic rock and equatorial sun.”

“Then you must do the observing,” I answered lightly, “while I keep the camp in order. It is not weakness to know one’s limits.”

His hand, resting near mine upon the blanket, closed briefly at that. “I have always relied upon your steadiness,” he said more softly. “It unsettles me to imagine you faltering there.”

“And I,” I returned, “have long relied upon yours. Yet how often have I found you pushing yourself beyond sleep, beyond meals? If I must guard my strength, you must guard yours.”

He laughed under his breath, amused rather than stung. “Touché. A compact, then—you to your regimen, I to mine. Together we shall contrive to appear almost sensible.”

The Argus lurched against a wave, throwing the lamp into a wild arc and pitching us together. Holmes caught me instinctively, his arm bracing my shoulders with surprising strength. For a heartbeat we remained pressed close, the boards of the bunk hard at my back, his face so near I saw the faint line of fatigue at the corner of his eyes. His breath stirred the hair at my temple, and I was suddenly aware of the warmth of him, steady and unyielding in that shifting world.

The ship steadied, though neither of us moved at once. His arm eased, but he did not quite let go, and I found myself absurdly unwilling to shift away. The noise of the sea filled the silence between us until at last he muttered, almost sheepishly, “It appears the Argus has conspired to enforce our compact.”

I laughed under my breath, the sound caught between mirth and something deeper. When we righted ourselves, the cabin seemed smaller than ever, and the space we left between us felt deliberate.

The hour was late. With a conspiratorial glance toward the thin bulkhead, Holmes stretched out beside me. It was a clumsy fit—boards hard beneath us, our shoulders pressed close—but neither of us made the smallest effort to part. He drew the blanket over us both, his hand lingering against my arm as though reluctant to retreat.

For a time I lay still, listening to the rhythm of his breathing settle, the ship’s timbers answering with their own long sighs. Yet sleep did not come so easily to me. My wound throbbed with a dull insistence, and I wondered—not for the first time—whether I was wise to attempt so arduous a journey. I told myself I had crossed deserts and battlefields in far worse condition, yet in the vast, indifferent sea my frailty seemed newly and painfully stark.

I must have dozed, for when next I stirred the lamp had guttered low, and I caught a glimpse of him standing at the rail outside, cigarette ember glowing against the dark. The ship’s timbers groaned like some restless sleeper, and in that moment I felt how narrow a barrier of wood and will lay between us and the ocean’s appetite.

If I slept at last, it was shallow and broken, and I woke to a dawn that seemed too fair to be trusted. The following morning found me stronger, and at Holmes’s urging I ventured upon deck to take the air. The horizon was gilded by the rising sun, casting a broad path of molten light across the waves. The sea wore a mask of gentleness in that hour—the swell long and even, the gulls dipping idly about our wake—and for a time I felt almost restored, leaning gratefully upon the rail and drawing the salt wind deep into my lungs.

Holmes stood near, his collar turned up against the breeze, the keen lines of his profile etched sharp in the golden glow. He greeted the day with the same intensity he brought to every problem, his gaze sweeping sky and sea as if they formed some vast cipher awaiting his interpretation.

“It is a beautiful morning,” said I.

“Beautiful, yes,” he murmured, “but beauty is no guarantee of benevolence.” His long finger indicated the barometer fixed outside the captain’s cabin. The needle had slipped almost imperceptibly since the night before, yet enough for him to mark it.

As if to echo his observation, a heaviness had settled into my injured leg, that old campaign-wound which ever served me as a surer forecaster than any instrument. I shifted uneasily and remarked upon the ache, my hand tightening on the handle of my cane. Holmes’s glance was swift, his concern unspoken, and for a moment his hand brushed mine where it gripped the rail—a fleeting touch, but one that steadied me more than the cane.

“Then we must keep watch,” was all he said.

Already the crew moved with a subdued energy, reefing canvas though the wind was hardly brisk, and I saw the captain cast more than one glance toward the dark smudge at the horizon. The gulls that had wheeled so noisily about our wake seemed fewer now, as though they too had sensed the change in the air.

The light broadened upon the sea, bright and cold, and the others began to emerge yawning from their cabins. To them it was merely another fair morning upon the Pacific. But for myself, the calm rang hollow—as though the ocean, so vast and still, were only holding its breath before it chose to break.

I little guessed how soon that fair calm would be shattered, and how dearly we should pay for mistaking beauty for benevolence.

Chapter Text

By midday the Argus seemed the very picture of serenity, though it was a serenity edged with strain. The sun blazed high, turning the sea into hammered silver—hard, bright, unyielding. The uneasy pitch of morning had eased into a steady glide, yet the stillness carried no comfort. A faint breeze stirred the canvas, just enough to keep us moving, while the air smelled of salt and tar with a sharper note of resin from the scrubbed decks. The sailors moved briskly, their bare feet slapping the planks in rhythm. To an untrained eye it might have been diligence; to mine, it was the silence between their glances aloft that betrayed them.

I, still weak from my earlier indisposition, allowed myself to believe the captain’s mutterings mere habit, the reflex of men who live always at the mercy of wind and wave. For a time the brilliance of the sea lulled me: its surface flashing like metal under the hammer, broken only by a flying fish or the white arc of a gull. London’s fogs seemed an ocean away.

Holmes, however, was not deceived. All forenoon he paced the rail, spyglass shifting between horizon and rigging, noting each sail shortened while the sky remained cloudless. His brows wore that familiar crease of conclusions forming. He said nothing, but his silence gathered weight, like thunder still beyond sight.

The sailors moved briskly, their bare feet slapping the planks in rhythm. To an untrained eye it might have been diligence; to mine, it was the silence between their glances aloft that betrayed them. One man, thinking himself unobserved, spat over the side and traced a quick sign against his breast. Another cuffed him for it, muttering low, and the two fell back into their work without a word. I asked no questions. It was plain enough that the sea had unsettled them, though not a whisper of it reached the captain’s ears.

Holmes lowered his glass only long enough to murmur, “The glass is falling faster than their courage.” His tone was matter-of-fact, almost clinical, but I saw how tightly he clenched the rail. When I pressed for more, he shook his head. “Wait. The sea will speak for herself soon enough.”

At dinner the company assembled about the narrow table, lamps swinging overhead, their light catching weary faces. The naturalists chattered heedlessly of beetles and birds, one even musing on smuggling a tortoise hatchling home as proof of his voyage. Their journals lay open among the soup bowls, as if words might fix their prey against the shifting sea.

The clergyman sat like a wraith, his cheeks hollow, his breath rattling. Yet he smiled faintly, murmuring that the islands’ warmth might ease his lungs. “If I could walk a mile without pain,” he whispered, “it would be a blessing.” His hands trembled as he raised his cup, and I wondered if he would ever live to see that shore.

The lamps swayed, shadows stretching with each tilt of the ship. Cutlery rattled faintly against plates, a sound so slight the others paid it no mind, yet it scraped my nerves like a bow across a cello’s string.

The merchant ate grimly, shoulders hunched, his knife and fork moving in dour rhythm. Once, as the ship gave a long shudder, he slipped a hand into his coat and drew out a small notebook. His eyes flicked to the porthole, then down to the page where his pencil scratched quick figures even as the lamps swung overhead. For a moment his lips curved—not with mirth, but with the satisfaction of a balance struck—before he snapped the book shut and resumed his meal.

I found my appetite returning and welcomed it as a sign of recovery. But as I lifted my cup, the ship trembled—not sharp, but a long vibration that travelled from keel to mast. The naturalists laughed louder; the clergyman closed his eyes in prayer; the merchant chewed on. None marked it.

But Holmes did. His gaze met mine across the table. In his eyes I read certainty. His mouth curved in that half-smile of his—less comfort than warning. The sea was changing, whether the others perceived it or not.

The afternoon wore on with a deceptive brightness. The sun still shone, but its warmth was thin, and the water had taken on a bleached pallor. The sailors’ voices, usually buoyant, dropped into mutters, and though the decks gleamed from their labours, strain hung in the air like a bowstring drawn too tight.

The others seemed blind to it. The naturalists perched by the quarterdeck, quarreling over the classification of a beetle with the gravity of statesmen debating empires. Holmes chuckled once, but kept his glass fixed on the horizon.

The clergyman drifted to my side. His hand, thin and tremulous, closed on my sleeve. “You are a medical man, are you not, Dr. Watson? Tell me—will the tropics restore me? The warmth here already feels like balm.”

I gave a cautious answer—that mild climates sometimes eased weak lungs—but he pressed on, wheezing. “And my heart? This constriction, this rattle in the chest—tell me plainly. I cannot pray it away if it is mortal.”

My leg throbbed with the swell, and the dull ache had worn at me all day. I had come on this voyage seeking rest, not to be cornered by the same questions that haunted my practice ashore. Weariness, pain, and the faint sting of resentment mingled, and before I could check myself, impatience edged my reply. “I cannot give you certainty, sir. Rest and warmth may help, yes, but the tropics are no cure-all. You must not expect miracles.”

His eyes dropped at once. A gust bellied the canvas before letting it fall slack again. “No miracles,” he murmured, as though the words sealed a fate.

Regret pricked me the moment the words were out. He had asked in desperation, not arrogance, and I had let my own discomfort shorten my temper. My attempt at gentleness fell flat, and the look on his face stayed with me long after he drifted away.

Holmes had witnessed it, though he feigned indifference. Only the faint quirk of his mouth betrayed him—not mockery, but sympathy, edged with the rueful understanding of a man who knew pain himself.

Later, as the lamps were lit, I saw him cough into his handkerchief and fold it quickly away. The faint smear of red upon the linen haunted me more than his whispered prayers. He caught my glance, but said nothing—only drew the cloth tighter about his shoulders and turned toward the companionway.

The merchant kept apart, pacing with the restlessness of a caged thing. His boots struck out of rhythm with the ship’s roll, and more than once he paused at the open hatch, staring down as though taking inventory in the dark. When he caught my eye, he scowled and strode away.

By evening the swell had grown uneven. The gulls that had followed our wake were gone, and a hush fell over the sea, uncanny in its depth. One by one the others retired, until only Holmes and I stood at the rail. The air was heavy, metallic on the tongue. My leg throbbed in warning.

Holmes tapped his cigarette against the rail, eyes narrowed on a dark wall of cloud massing at the horizon.

“The others see only the glow of sunset,” I murmured.

“Quite so.” His voice was quiet, but edged. “Beauty is no guarantee of benevolence. It gathers, Watson.”

And though I could not yet hear it, I fancied the sea itself had begun to murmur of what was coming. My leg throbbed with each rise of the swell, a pulse that seemed to answer the groan of the timbers. I had known that rhythm before—in tents heavy with smoke, when silence stretched before the next volley of guns. It was the same dread now: not fear of the blow itself, but of the waiting, when every breath was borrowed.

The sea lay strangely calm, the horizon a smear of copper light beneath the darkening cloud. No gulls wheeled in our wake, and the air hung heavy as lead. For an instant the stillness seemed almost holy, as if the world held its breath. Yet I knew better. Calm is only another mask for violence.

The night would not settle. Though the sky above remained pitilessly clear, the ship groaned as if restless in her own bones. Each gust set the timbers shuddering, the ropes snapping taut, the sails cracking like whips overhead. The air in the cabin was close and heavy—salt and tar mingled with damp—so that every breath seemed drawn through water. Sleep came to me only in broken fragments. My leg throbbed with a dull persistence, each spasm mocking whatever position I tried.

Holmes had refused to share my bunk, for fear of jostling me. I had let him persuade me of his logic, though the absence of his nearness weighed as heavily as the storm itself.

He rose often. I heard the scratch of his match, the flare of the lamp, the soft tread across the boards. At the porthole, the glow of his cigarette made a pale lantern of his face, intent against the black sea. Each time he returned, the crease between his brows had deepened, as if the weather itself were whispering calculations only he could hear.

At last, catching me shift with a muffled groan, he asked, low: “Does it pain you much?”

“It is the weather,” I admitted. “Pressure always finds the weak points.”

He came to my side and drew the blanket straighter. The gesture was brisk, almost harsh, yet his hand lingered at my shoulder. “You should not bear it alone.”

“There is nothing to be done,” I said. “It will pass when the storm does. You need not keep vigil on my account.”

He did not answer. I felt rather than saw him draw a chair beside me, the faint rasp of its legs nearly lost in the ship’s groans. He sat there through the long dark, the sound of his breathing in the hush between the canvas reports and the lash of rigging. If he could not drive back pain or tempest, he would at least hold the night with me. And in that grim companionship—more watch than comfort—I found the only rest the storm would allow.

When dawn came, it brought no relief. The sun broke red through a haze of cloud, a disk more sullen than bright, its light bleeding across the sea like a wound. The air was sodden, each breath drawing dampness into the lungs, and my leg throbbed with a steady insistence that set me on edge before I ever reached the deck.

The naturalists emerged first, journals clutched to their chests as though the pages might shield them. Their chatter faltered when they looked skyward. The clergyman lingered at the companionway, his hands knotted together in prayer, lips moving soundlessly. The merchant alone claimed the rail, shoulders squared, his face carved into unreadable lines as he stared into the growing swell.

Holmes said little, but his eyes returned again and again to the horizon, where the clouds had thickened into a jagged wall, black against the waking sea. The barometer, when I passed it, had plunged like a stone. Even the crew, seasoned though they were, betrayed unease. They moved with swift precision, yet without speech, securing lines and lashing down hatches as though binding the ship against a violence already at hand.

Gone were the shouts and laughter of calmer days. Orders came clipped and low, answered with grim nods. Buckets and gear vanished below; tarpaulins were hauled taut; spars and rigging checked and rechecked until the vessel seemed trussed for surgery, braced for an ordeal no man could avert.

I caught the furtive glances men cast at the sky when they thought themselves unobserved, the hurried adjustments at the wheel as the swell heaved under us. These were not empty precautions, but the gestures of sailors who knew the sea had turned predator.

Holmes leaned close, his voice pitched low so none but I could hear. “There is discipline here, Watson, but no confidence. They fortify her as for siege.”

I looked at him then, at the narrowed eyes and set jaw, and read in his face the same certainty that made the crew work in silence. He had already seen the shape of what was coming. My old wound throbbed in time with the straining timbers, and for the first time in many years I felt the chill of battlefield dread—that foreknowledge of disaster which no courage can dispel.

By the time the sun had cleared the horizon, the first gust struck. It tore at the canvas with a crack like cannon-fire and sent spray stinging across the deck. The Argus shuddered beneath the blow, her timbers groaning as if the sea had gripped her bones. I clutched the rail, met Holmes’s eye, and saw him give the smallest of nods. The storm had come.

A moment before, the air had been heavy and still; now rain fell in torrents, blinding and cold, sluicing across the planks until the world shrank to the length of the deck.

The wind followed, shrieking through rigging, lashing the sails until they thundered like guns. Men shouted, their voices ripped away by the gale, their bodies blurred into phantoms by the sheeting rain. The steady pitch of our voyage became a violent lurch, the ship leaping like a toy in a giant’s hand.

Fear showed itself in every face. The naturalists, bold in their disputes the night before, now huddled at the companionway, journals forgotten, one weeping openly. The clergyman swayed with clasped hands, prayers torn from his lips. Only the merchant stood firm at the rail, jaw clenched, daring the sea to answer his stare.

Above, sails split with pistol-shot cracks, canvas shredding seam by seam. Ropes screamed and snapped, lashing like whips. Though the sun hovered behind the storm, its light was leached to a ghostly disc, casting no warmth. The sea, once silver, had turned to iron.

The deck heaved, throwing men to their knees. Buckets and gear clattered and slid before vanishing overboard. Below came the muffled thud of cargo breaking loose, each reverberation like a drumbeat of doom. Holmes braced beside me, one hand shielding his eyes, hair plastered, coat whipping in the gale. His voice, pitched low, reached me through the din:

“This will not pass quickly, Watson.”

Even as he spoke, another blast struck. The Argus heeled violently, flinging us against the rail. A cry went up. Waves broke over the bows, sweeping men like driftwood.

The ship fought bravely, but she was outmatched. Masts shuddered, spars snapped with splintering crashes, and somewhere a scream was cut short. Orders blurred into curses and prayers, the whole swallowed in the storm’s roar.

Holmes’s hand clamped on my arm. “Hold fast!” he cried, his voice raw, a thread against the howl.

Then, sudden as it had risen, the gale eased. Rain still lashed the deck, but the shriek of the wind dropped to a ragged moan. The Argus lay canted, timbers groaning, as if stunned by the last blow. Men clung where they had fallen, their breaths ragged.

One sailor, a wiry youth, staggered to secure a loose line. Before he reached it, the rope snapped with a crack like a gunshot. The end whipped across the deck and struck him full in the chest. He was hurled against the rail, his cry lost in spray, and the sea took him. No one called his name. The crew had no breath to spare for the dead.

I wiped brine from my eyes and thought—foolishly—that the worst had passed. The naturalists stirred from their huddle, one sobbing, the other mumbling that the sky was lightening. The clergyman’s lips moved in silent prayer.

Holmes’s grip never left my arm. His face was pale in the ghostly daylight, eyes fixed on the horizon. “Do not trust it,” he murmured. “The sea gathers its strength.”

My wound throbbed with each heartbeat, and I knew he was right. I had served under fire before. I recognized the dread that steals in during lulls, when the world holds its breath.

A cry rose near the mainmast, and I saw a man struck senseless by a falling block. Instinct drove me half a step forward—yet what aid had I to give? The deck pitched beneath me, my leg flared with fire, and before I could draw a breath he had been dragged aside by his fellows. I felt the shame of my own helplessness as keenly as if I had abandoned him, though I knew the sea had already passed its sentence.

The ship lurched again, violently, and cries went up as rigging tore loose. The brief calm was gone. Holmes’s grip tightened, fingers biting through soaked cloth.

Then the wave rose black before us. Towering, vast, it blotted out sky and sea alike. For an instant it seemed to hang, merciless, before it fell.

The ship vanished beneath the wave. Water, timber, and human cries engulfed us. Holmes’s hand was torn from my sleeve. A heartbeat later I was hurled into the sea.

The world became foam and darkness. Salt scalded my throat; the roar of the storm pressed against my skull until thought itself was driven out. The cold gnawed to the bone, each limb stiffening even as I thrashed for air.

I surfaced once, choking, and glimpsed the ruin: men clawing amid shattered spars, a face pale in the spray before it vanished, the merchant’s broad shoulders sucked down in a whirl of foam. A mast spun past like a spear, missing me by inches. The Argus herself loomed for a moment, bow lifted high, her timbers breaking, then she was gone, swallowed whole.

The sea closed over me again. I kicked upward, lungs screaming, but the weight of water bore me down. My cane slipped from my grasp, spiralling away into the dark. A current seized me, dragging sideways, tumbling me head over heel until I no longer knew up from down.

I broke the surface once more—long enough to gulp brine-laden air and hear the screams thinning into nothing—but a wave struck full across my back and drove me under. My chest burned; my body fought for breath where none could be had.

Darkness thickened. My arms grew leaden. The storm’s roar dimmed to a hollow pounding within my skull. In those final moments of struggle, there was no sky, no ship, no companion’s hand to catch mine. There was only water.

Chapter Text

I came to myself on a strip of black sand, the surf breaking cold over my legs and tugging as though it meant to reclaim me. Instinct drove me higher; I clawed at the gritty shore, hands slipping in wet sand, dragging my body forward inch by inch. Each surge of the tide struck like a blow, threatening to sweep me back into its grasp. At last I reached the jagged ridge of volcanic stone and collapsed against it, the rock tearing my palms but anchoring me above the wash.

My chest heaved, the air raw in my throat. I spat brine and coughed until my ribs ached. Salt burned my eyes; my ears still roared with the memory of the storm, as though the sea itself had taken root within me and would not loose its hold.

I forced myself to take stock. My body ached in every joint, battered and bruised, but no bones were broken. My left leg—the old campaign wound—had been wrenched cruelly, throbbing with a pain so fierce I could scarcely bear weight upon it. My hands were raw and bleeding from some rope or spar I had clutched in the sea.

Otherwise, I lived.

My coat still clung sodden to me, and in its inner pocket, miracle of miracles, my small flask of laudanum. My medical bag and cane had presumably gone to the deep. I pressed the pocket shut, vowing not to waste its contents until desperation stripped me of choice.

The beach was strewn with wreckage: broken spars, crates split by the sea, coils of rope trailing like entrails. Gulls wheeled and shrieked overhead, clamouring over the flotsam with a hunger that made me uneasy. Yet it was not only their presence that chilled me. The sand itself was black as coal, coarse grains clinging like ash, so unlike the pale shores of home that it seemed I had been cast onto another world. Each step I pressed into it left a sharp-edged hollow, filling at once with brackish water that gleamed in the pallid light.

The cliffs rose sheer, formed of twisted lava frozen in grotesque contortions, as though the island had been birthed in agony. Pools gleamed among the rocks, rims white with salt, surfaces filmed with an oily sheen. Nothing was familiar. There were no cottages, no pasture, no hedge. Only this hostile strand, lifeless save for the shattered bones of the Argus.

Of the ship herself there was no sign, nor of the men who had crewed her decks. Only wreckage remained, scattered like offerings across a shore that seemed never meant for human foot.

I braced myself against the stone and cupped my hands to shout. “Holmes!” My voice cracked, harsh in the emptiness. No answer but the hiss of the surf. I called again, louder, until the effort left me trembling. Still nothing.

The shore curved away in both directions, hemmed by jagged cliffs of black lava. Beyond them the island loomed—bleak, forbidding, silent.

I was alive. Yet whether I was alone, I could not say.

I tested the leg again and found I could hobble, so long as I leaned on a length of driftwood scavenged from the wreckage. It made a wretched substitute for my cane, rough and splintering in the palm, but it steadied me enough to stagger a few steps. Each movement sent fire through the joint, the old wound shrieking with every shift of weight. My body obeyed only because shock still drove it forward; without that, I might well have lain down and let the tide finish its work.

The gulls had begun to close in, bold in their hunger, wheeling lower with each pass. Their cries clawed at my raw nerves until I felt I would go mad beneath them. The tide, too, crept higher, waves licking at the wreckage as though eager to reclaim it—and me with it. If I remained where I was, half-broken and dazed, I would serve only as carrion for the birds or a toy for the surf.

Better to stumble than to wait. My thoughts were slow, scattered, as though I gazed on the world through a veil of seawater, but some instinct stronger than reason forced me upward: the soldier’s reflex to claim higher ground, the doctor’s knowledge that a man who lies still in such a place will not long remain among the living.

So I pressed on, limping, dragging myself beyond the reach of tide and circling wings. Each step was a contest against pain, each breath a reminder that the island itself seemed bent on driving me back into the sea.

The island revealed itself in fragments as I went, clinging to the shore. The sand gave way to shelves of jagged rock, black and sharp as slag from a furnace, each step a hazard that demanded care my body could scarcely afford. Pools of brine collected in the hollows, their surfaces filmed with a sickly rainbow sheen that shimmered like corruption. Beyond the beach rose cliffs of twisted lava, contorted into grotesque shapes as though the earth had writhed in torment when it cooled.

Vegetation clung only in wiry tufts: coarse grasses, salt-scorched shrubs, the bleached skeletons of cactus. Nothing lush, nothing to suggest welcome. The air hung heavy with the storm’s remnants, tainted by a sulphurous, metallic tang, as though the island itself exhaled decay with every breath.

A solitary bird wheeled above me, its cry harsh and unmusical, unlike any gull of temperate coasts. Farther inland, upon the cliff’s rim, I thought I glimpsed shapes moving, but whether tortoises or tricks of haze I could not be sure.

Often I halted, scanning the strand for some trace of humanity: a footprint, a voice, any sign I was not marooned utterly alone. Each pause yielded only the hiss of the waves and the gulls’ shriek, and the silence between pressed upon my chest like a weight.

Again I cupped my hands and called, “Holmes!” The name echoed back from the cliffs, hollow, as though the island mocked me. No answer but the surf.

The storm had flung me alive upon this shore, yet as I stared at the stark black cliffs and restless sea, I could not say whether survival had been mercy or punishment.

I pressed on, leaning heavily on my makeshift staff. Each step jarred my leg until pain blurred into a dull throb that kept time with the pounding surf. My eyes searched constantly along the strand, half-expecting a body to be cast up with every turn of the tide.

Instead, rounding the curve of the bay, I came upon something stranger still. The sand yielded to a scatter of timbers—weathered beams once lashed upright, now broken and slanting like rotten teeth. Beyond them sprawled the outlines of crumbling walls built from stacked stone, roofless and deserted, their corners colonised by cactus and lichen. A rusted kettle lay in the sand; the skeletal frame of a hut door leaned half-buried against the rock.

I stood a long while among these ruins, listening. The sea hissed, a gull wheeled, but no voice, no footstep, no human sound disturbed the silence. Whoever had built here was long gone.

And yet the place unsettled me. The stones bore the deliberate marks of tools, not nature. The charred ring of a fire-pit lingered still, blackened though half-filled with sand. A settlement then—abandoned, whether through hunger, storm, or worse, I could not tell.

Beyond the ruin, wedged between the rocks, lay fresher wreckage. My heart lurched as I saw it: a splintered boat’s hull, crates dashed open, a coil of rope still slick with seawater. Pieces of the Argus, scattered here as the storm’s last grim offering.

And not only wreckage. From behind the jut of a broken wall came a sound—faint, but unmistakable. A cough, hoarse and human.

“Holmes?” I called, stumbling forward.

The answer came not in words but in the long figure that rose slowly from amid the debris. For a moment I doubted my own senses, certain the ruin had conjured a phantom to mock me. His coat was sodden, his hat gone, dark hair plastered to his brow. A gash marred his temple, the blood thinned by the sea, and his hands were raw with rope-burns. Yet he stood straight, braced against the stones, his eyes keen even through exhaustion.

Relief struck me, though disbelief still clung. I had pictured him broken in the surf, claimed as so many others had been, and to see him upright now seemed near-impossible.

“You are alive,” I managed, my voice rough as the surf.

“By no great margin,” he returned, his gaze running over me, halting at my limp and the bloodied scrape of my hands. “You are hurt.”

“And you,” I countered, nodding toward the wound at his brow.

He waved it aside, though the motion cost him. “A trifle. Yours troubles me more.”

I stepped toward him, leaning heavily on my staff, half-afraid he would vanish if I reached too quickly. “I thought the sea had taken you.”

“And I, you,” he said quietly. The words carried more weight than any oath I had ever heard.

In the next breath the distance between us collapsed—whether by his movement or mine I could not say. His hand found my shoulder with a grip as if to anchor me to earth itself; my fingers clutched at his sleeve with equal desperation. For an instant we held fast, foreheads pressed together, as though testing the solidity of the other. Then his mouth found mine—brief, rough, tasting of salt and blood, but no less certain for it.

When we parted, breathless, he did not at once release me. His hand lingered at the back of my neck, steadying, before sliding down to my shoulder and holding me there. The sea hissed at our backs, the gulls shrieked overhead, and for that instant the whole island seemed to pause, listening.

At length he exhaled, a rough sound, and eased his hand away, not quickly, but with a reluctance he did not trouble to hide. He remained close, fingers brushing mine before forcing them back into his coat as if to master himself. 

“We must think of water,” he said, voice steadier than his face. “Shelter, too. And the others, if any live.” His gaze flicked toward the wreckage, then returned to me with a look that lingered longer than prudence allowed. 

He moved as though to step past me to pave the way, but the ground tilted under my feet and the strength went out of my leg. I caught at my staff too late; the world blurred with a sickening rush, and I would have gone sprawling had Holmes not seized me by the arm.

“Easy,” he said, his grip iron, holding me upright against the pull of my own body. His face was pale beneath the salt and blood, but his eyes were unyielding. “You are scarcely fit to stand.”

“I am not helpless,” I rasped, though even as I said it I leaned into the steadiness of his hand.

“No,” he agreed, his voice low. “But neither are you alone.”

For a moment we stood thus, the surf hissing at our backs, his arm a firm barrier between me and the black sand that threatened to reclaim me. Then, with deliberate care, he shifted my weight against his side.

“Come,” he said. “Whatever this island means to us, we will not meet it on our knees.”

The ruins offered at least the shadow of shelter. We picked our way among tumbled stones and splintered beams, Holmes steadying me whenever the ground betrayed my footing. Once, perhaps, these had been huts or storehouses, but now only fragments endured: walls knee-high, a hearth half-choked with sand, the rotted beam of a roof sprawled like a fallen mast.

Holmes ran his hand along the stones, frowning. “The work is deliberate. Mortared. Not sailors’ huts thrown together for a season, but dwellings meant to endure. Yet no one lives here now.”

“Abandoned?” I asked, lowering myself onto a block of lava to ease my leg.

“Or emptied,” he said grimly. His eyes swept the ground, searching. “No footprints fresh enough to reassure me. Nothing but the gulls.”

The wind rattled through the timbers, setting one loose plank knocking against another in a rhythm too steady to be chance. I glanced toward it and saw, half-buried in the sand, a fragment of crockery, its glaze crazed with age. Nearby, a rusted hinge jutted from a beam, the wood about it blackened as if by fire.

My eyes caught on something half-buried in the sand beside the hearth: a child’s shoe, its leather cracked and stiff with age, one strap still fastened. I stared at it longer than I ought, the absurdity of such a small thing among these black stones pressing hard upon me. Whoever had lived here had not only laboured and eaten but walked these walls with children at their side—and then had gone, leaving this token to rot.

Holmes stooped beside me, his hand brushing the ash at the hearth. His face gave no sign he had seen the shoe, but I thought his shoulders tightened. “They did not leave in haste,” he said. “But they did leave.”

“Could we remain here?” I asked. “The walls at least break the wind.”

“For a night, perhaps,” he allowed. “But we will need water, firewood, food—and eyes open. This place tells me nothing of why it was left.”

He crouched to examine a shard of pottery, turning it in his hand as though weighing its silence, then set it down with care. “They lived here long enough to bring comforts, yet they did not remain. That alone troubles me.”

I followed his gaze across the ruin. The hearth beside me, half-choked with sand, still bore the faint outline of ash, as though its last fire had died only yesterday. I said nothing.

Holmes straightened and looked at me. “Have you seen any of the others?”

“Not a soul,” I said. “Only wreckage.” The memory of flailing hands in the surf rose so sharply that I closed my eyes.

His gaze lingered. “I feared as much. I was swept under... when I surfaced, I thought you lost with them.”

“And I, you,” I said, forcing steadiness into my voice. “But we are here. That must suffice until we know more.”

Holmes guided me to the lee of the tallest wall, where a narrow corner still held against the years. It broke the wind enough that I could sink down without fear of being driven sideways by every gust. My leg throbbed relentlessly, and though I kept my face schooled, Holmes noted it at once. Without a word he folded his coat to prop beneath my knee, then straightened, brushing the sand from his hands.

“We must ration strength,” he said, pacing the broken enclosure as though measuring it for habitation. “If we can gather driftwood enough, this wall may shield a small fire. And with luck, there may be a spring inland—lava is treacherous, but it hides water in its folds.” He spoke with the crispness of command, yet his gaze flicked often toward me, as though doubting whether I would last long enough to see any plan carried through.

I forced myself to keep my voice level. “It is not the first night we have spent in worse quarters, Holmes. A camp bed in Afghanistan was hardly more luxurious.”

“No,” he said softly, “but you did not come from the sea half-drowned then.” His tone had an edge that chilled me. When I looked up, he was already turning away, examining the charred ring of the old fire-pit.

The silence stretched. The gulls wheeled above us, their cries shrill, echoing from the cliffs. Beyond them, nothing moved—no step, no shout, no signal of another living soul.

Holmes had turned from the fire-pit, words of caution still on his lips, when his step faltered. The hand that brushed the stone lingered too long, gripping it as though the world had tilted beneath him. For an instant his face blanched, the line of blood at his temple stark against the pallor.

“You are hurt worse than you admit,” I said, rising half a pace before my leg betrayed me.

He straightened at once, jaw tight. “A moment’s dizziness—no more.”

But when I caught his sleeve he did not pull away. The heat of his skin beneath the sodden fabric betrayed a tremor, and for the space of a breath he leaned fractionally into my hold.

“Holmes,” I said quietly, “do not spend yourself to keep me upright only to fall beside me.”

The corner of his mouth twitched—neither smile nor denial. Then, with visible effort, he drew himself straight and gestured toward the wall where I had left my staff. “We ration strength, you and I both. It is the only way we last the night.”

At last I said again, “Do you suppose the others—?” I faltered, unable to finish.

Holmes did not face me. “If they survived, they have not come here.”

The bluntness cut colder than the wind. For a long time neither of us spoke. The ruins seemed to draw closer, the black cliffs hemming the sky, until it felt as though we two were the last men left upon the earth.

When the worst of our ragged breath had steadied, Holmes would not permit idleness. With daylight already waning, he urged me from the ruins, and together we hobbled along the strand to see what the storm had spared.

The harvest was meagre. A half-splintered crate yielded only sodden biscuit, its contents crumbled to pulp. A length of rope, frayed but serviceable, we coiled and carried. A dented tin cup Holmes pocketed with the satisfaction of a man who knew its worth here might prove greater than gold.

I came upon a battered cask wedged between two rocks and bent to wrestle it free, my leg flaring in protest. Holmes was at my side at once, levering it loose with a length of spar. The staves groaned but held, and when he prised it open with his knife, a trickle of fresh water seeped through the cracks. 

“It will not last us long,” he said, setting the cask upright, “but for the moment, it may keep us alive.”

Holmes closed the cask with grim satisfaction, as though the matter were settled. Yet as he turned the rope about it, my gaze strayed back to the tide. I thought of the men swept from the Argus, arms thrashing in the foam, cries drowned in the storm. Their faces returned so vividly that my throat constricted.

Holmes saw it, and for a moment he paused, his knife still in hand. “We cannot call them back,” he said, as if reading my thought. “Only account for ourselves.”

The words struck cold—merciless in their truth. I nodded, though bitterness swelled at the ease with which he spoke it. He bound the rope tight, and the matter was closed.

By the time the sun had dropped low, our spoils amounted to little: the cask of water, a few scraps of driftwood, and what remained of the ruined biscuits. Yet in our state it seemed treasure enough. We bore them back to the shelter of the stone wall and laid them out with the care of misers counting coins.

The gulls had claimed the wreckage in our absence, their harsh cries carrying across the strand. The air was heavy with salt and the faint tang of sulphur, and beyond the black cliffs the island loomed—silent, unknowable, as though it watched our every movement.

Holmes sank beside me at last, his long frame pressed awkwardly against the stone. “For tonight,” he said, “this will serve. Tomorrow, we search further.”

I nodded, though my eyes searched the darkening strand one last time. No figures moved there, no voices answered. The sea had delivered us alive, but I could not shake the sense of being counted, measured, by an unseen presence.

Holmes contrived a small fire with driftwood and a twist of cord, crouching over it until smoke gave way to flame. The glow threw restless shadows upon the stone, painting the ruin with a fragile, flickering life. I eased myself down beside it, grateful for the heat against my salt-stiff clothes, though every shift of my leg sent pain lancing upward.

Holmes watched me settle, his eyes sharp even through the fatigue etched in his face. “You should dose yourself,” he said, nodding toward my breast pocket.

“Not yet,” I murmured. “If I spend it now, I shall have none when I truly need it.”

He made a sound that might have been impatience, but his hand strayed briefly to my knee, the pressure firm and grounding. “Stubborn as ever.”

“And you would have me otherwise?”

His mouth curved, not quite a smile. “No. It is that very obstinacy that pulled you out of the sea.”

The fire cracked between us. For a long moment he said nothing more, and I thought the admission had gone as quickly as it came. But then his hand, still lingering at my knee, slid down to cover mine where it lay upon the sand.

“I meant what I said,” he murmured, low enough that the gulls themselves might not overhear. “I will not be parted from you again.”

I turned my hand beneath his, closing my fingers around his own. The contact was rough, salt-stung, raw from rope-burns, and yet it steadied me more than any cordial.

“We are alone here,” I said quietly.

His grey eyes lifted to mine, the firelight catching in them, stripped of their usual guard. For a long moment neither of us moved, the ruin about us no more than a ring of stone and shadow, the sea muffled beyond its walls. Then he leaned nearer, his forehead brushing mine, his hand rising almost tentatively to touch my chin. His breath carried the tang of smoke and salt, warm against the chill.

The kiss that followed bore none of the desperation of the beach. It was slower, steadier, yet no less certain. It lingered, unhurried, as though we both knew the world beyond the fire would not grant us many such hours. When at last he drew back, his hand remained twined in mine. He let out a long breath and settled beside me, his shoulder pressing close against my own.

“Tomorrow will bring whatever it brings,” he said, voice low. “Tonight, at least, is ours.”

So we sat, the fire dwindling to embers, the sea murmuring beyond the stones. The island’s silence pressed close, but here in the fragile glow we had carved out a space it could not breach.

As the fire sank, I shifted against the stone, seeking some position that spared my leg, and felt him move with me, unhesitating. His arm came round my shoulders, drawing me close until my head rested against his chest, the rhythm of his breathing steady against the desolation. My hand found its place against him, and together we fit ourselves into the narrow shelter of the ruin.

Sleep crept upon me at last, and with it the sea’s murmur beyond the walls. Yet just before the dark claimed me, another sound intruded—the faint scrape of stone on stone, too regular to be the wind.

Holmes’s arm tightened fractionally around me, and when I glanced upward I found his eyes still open, fixed on the shadows. He said nothing. And I let sleep take me, comfort wrapping close even as unease waited beyond the fire’s reach.

Chapter Text

Sleep did not hold me long. Some old instinct born of campaign nights when peril crept on silent feet roused me when the sky was still dark. Holmes’s arm was still about me, but his body was taut as a drawn bow.

Then I heard it: a guttural cry, thick and wet, followed by the stealthy rasp of movement across stone.

I held my breath until my chest ached, listening intently. The scrape of claws came next, sharp against rock, then the clatter of something overturned, and a low chuffing sound that seemed to breathe directly upon the nape of my neck.

The embers cast just enough glow to reveal them—shapes low and hulking, their bulk dragging across the ruin with dreadful certainty. I could hear their bellies rasping the ground, tails striking stone with a lash that echoed like a whip. Holmes’s words came back to me with sudden clarity: The sea-lion and the iguana rule these shores where men do not.

Sea lions, blunt-headed, snuffling among the wreckage with a funereal patience. And higher on the wall, a pair of iguanas crawled with deliberate malice, their limbs grotesquely jointed, their eyes shining like coals beneath scaled brows. Prehistoric horrors, half reptile, half dragon, wearing an indifference that was somehow more menacing than rage.

Holmes’ hand brushed mine. “They will not cross to us,” he whispered, breath hot at my ear. “They seek only what the tide has given.”

But I thought of what else the tide had given: our shipmates flung to these same rocks, their bodies broken upon the shoals. I could too easily imagine the beasts glutting themselves upon human flesh, bellies rasping red across the stones. The vision lodged itself cruelly in my mind, and I clenched my jaw to keep from shuddering.

The creatures lingered, pacing the ruin, testing its boundaries. Only after a long, airless stretch did they slink back toward the strand, their shadows merging with sea and wind. The silence they left behind was heavier than their presence, pressing down on my lungs until I realised I had been clenching every muscle.

Holmes’s arm tightened about me until the stiffness began to leave my frame. “Sleep,” he murmured, though his own voice was strained. “They will not trouble us more than the gulls.”

I doubted him, yet allowed my eyes to close. 

When next I woke, the fire had guttered to ash and a colourless dawn seeped through the gaps in the ruined wall. The sea stretched pale and endless, its rage spent, but the strand still bore the wreckage of storm and ship alike.

I was not where sleep had first claimed me. Holmes had moved me after I drifted off, setting my leg upon a folded scrap of sailcloth with his meticulous care. The kindness stung as much as it soothed; I had not the strength to resent how useless I must have seemed.

He was already risen, a lone figure in the grey light, collar turned against the morning chill, his gaze fixed on the horizon as though sheer will might force the island to surrender its secrets. At my stirring he came at once. “How fares the leg?”

“Stiff, but serviceable,” I said, forcing myself upright. The pain answered sharp and immediate, dulled only by exhaustion.

“Good. Then today we begin in earnest.” His eyes slid from the wreckage to the inland cliffs, their shadow heavy against the sky.

The fire pit stood nearby, our few spoils stacked close. Yet the barrel we had dragged the day before with such cost lay toppled on its side, the cracked wood smashed, the sand beneath it dark with damp. I stared, hollow, until Holmes spoke.

“The dogs,” he said flatly. “They have been here before us.”

A bitter pang went through me, sharper than thirst itself. I imagined the pack lapping greedily in the dark, the water that might have been life spilling down their gullets and into the sand.

Holmes set his jaw and turned away, gathering a sodden bundle of driftwood. He crouched before the ash, striking flint against steel, each spark falling with ruthless economy until a reluctant glow stirred. Smoke bit at my eyes, acrid and thin, but even that sting was a small comfort: flame meant order, and order meant survival.

“Fuel enough for the morning,” he murmured, though his voice carried more calculation than conviction. “We must seek tinder less begrudging. The island cannot be wholly inhospitable.”

I knelt beside him, contributing my meagre finds—splintered bark, a coil of seaweed brittle with salt. At last the fire caught, leaping briefly before settling into a thin flame. Its warmth licked our hands but seemed powerless against the damp that clung to our bones.

“What we require first is water,” I said hoarsely. “The sea gives us none, and the rain has gone.”

“Then water will dictate where we remain.” Holmes dusted his fingers and narrowed his eyes at the treeline, as though he might conjure a spring by will. “Food follows. Fire, water, food, shelter—strip life to its elements and it may be endured.”

I managed a smile, though my throat was raw. “Anywhere, provided one’s companion insists on stripping it to the elements.

His mouth twitched, but his gaze was already on the forest: the dark tangle, waiting.

I drew my coat tighter. “Shall we hazard it? A short reconnaissance, before the sun climbs.”

“Just so.” He rose stiffly, brushing sand from his knees. “Even disaster becomes a problem, once given the right frame. All we need is data.”

I claimed a charred stick from the dwindled fire to serve as staff. “Very well. Let us begin our experiment.”

We left the embers to smoulder as a beacon and set out along the beach. The sand was fouled with seaweed and shattered timbers, relics of the night’s violence. Every few yards some fragment called us down: a coil of rope half-buried, a spar split like bone, a crate spilling its rot to the tide.

Holmes moved briskly from one to the next, testing, discarding, his movements edged by impatience. “Rope we keep,” he said, looping a sodden length across his shoulder. His tone was clipped, as though the lack of meat or biscuit were a personal slight.

I stooped for a bent tin, its lid stubbornly intact, and hugged it to my side. “This may yet serve as a kettle.”

“The sea does not always take without giving,” he replied dryly. His eyes never left the waterline. “The storm will wash us gifts for days. We must be vigilant.”

I suggested we rest before pressing further. “We have rope and a vessel at least. A short pause—”

“Every hour lost is another gift surrendered to the tide,” Holmes snapped, sharper than he intended. He looked past me to the horizon, refusing to meet my eye.

I said nothing more, but the words lingered between us, brittle as the wreckage at our feet.

We walked on in silence, our boots sinking into damp sand while the surf hissed and receded at our ankles. Every so often Holmes paused, head cocked, as though the faintest thread of water might reach him across the roar of the sea. No trickle came—only the rasp of waves and the hollow ache of our thirst.

In a patch of sand between roots I found bones, picked white and clean, scattered in a way no tide could arrange. A print lay nearby, pressed deep in the damp earth: a paw, too large for fox, too narrow for sea-lion When the wind shifted I fancied I heard a bark, distant and sharp, carried through the trees.

At last I ventured, “If there is a stream, it will seek the shore. Best chance is here, not in the thickets.”

“Indeed.” He pointed to a shallow runnel etched in the sand, leading up toward the trees like a scar. “Here, perhaps. Rainwater, most likely, but worth the climb.”

We pressed inland a few paces, the scar dissolving quickly into stone and bramble. No stream greeted us—only a sudden flurry of wings as seabirds shrieked at our trespass. Holmes crouched, his fingers brushing the earth. “Damp. Enough to warrant return.” His tone was measured, yet I saw his shoulders tighten with the effort of rising. “For now, the coast may yield more.”

Behind us what was left of the wreck sprawled still, its timbers mingled with driftwood like bones scattered by some indifferent giant. I looked back and felt a hollow pang. “Every hour we delay, more of it will be lost.”

Holmes hefted the coil of rope against his shoulder, its weight dragging at him. “Then let us waste none, my dear fellow. The sea grants us one chance at its spoils.”

The ground rose steeply, roots coiling like traps. I stumbled, bark tearing the skin of my palm, and when I drew back my hand it was streaked with blood already clotting in the heat. The insects found it at once, a whining cloud eager for salt. I bound it with a scrap of cloth, and in that instant the island seemed not indifferent but actively hostile, as though it meant to bleed us out by inches.

We trudged on, two bent figures picking at the strand, scavengers by necessity. What we found was pitiful: the rope, the bent tin, a crate of hardtack swollen with damp, planks that might dry into firewood if the sun consented. A single glass bottle, whole against all odds, clinked as I stowed it in my coat—our richest prize, and still empty. Beyond that, the sea grudged us nothing.

Holmes turned each piece in his hands like a specimen, cataloguing ruin. “It will suffice,” he pronounced, though the strain in his voice betrayed the lie. “A kettle, a vessel, cordage enough for a dozen uses. Paltry, yes—but more than nothing.”

I looked to the horizon, where the grey-green breakers rolled on without end, dragging the Argus further into their maw. Her timbers were already dispersing, torn away by that vast appetite. “By tomorrow,” I said, “there may be nothing left at all.”

“Then today we must make shift.” He brushed grit from his palms with sharp, impatient strokes and turned toward the line of trees waiting, dark and inscrutable. “We have our spoils. Now comes the true experiment.”

By the time we stumbled back to our camp, the fire had guttered to a thread of embers, still breathing but close to death. I set down the tin and bottle, and Holmes dropped his coil of rope with a thud that seemed to take something from him as well.

“Not much to look at,” I muttered, crouching to stir the ashes until a reluctant flame licked up. “Yet better than nothing.”

Holmes knelt opposite, eyes fixed on the flame as though it were a cipher refusing solution. “Every expedition begins with less,” he said, but his voice was dry, his lips cracked. “It is the ingenuity we bring that must make the difference.”

He set the planks propped for drying, straightened stiffly, and brushed grit from his hands. “We have heat enough. Now we must prove the island will grant us water. Without that—” He left the words unfinished, the silence heavier than any conclusion.

I uncorked the empty bottle, turning it in my hand, imagining it cold and heavy with what we lacked. “Then inland, once we have strength.”

“Once we are ready,” he echoed. His gaze had gone to the treeline, where the shadows lay close and uninviting, the foliage clotted like a wound that had no wish to be opened.

We stood for a moment caught between sea and forest: the wreckage dissolving behind us, the unknown pressing before. The fire crackled faintly at our backs, a fragile tether to the known, and then we severed it, stepping into the island’s hold.

At once the air grew close and damp, thick with the scent of rot. Roots twisted across the ground like serpents, catching my boots, and more than once I clutched a trunk to keep from falling. Holmes pressed on, but I saw the stiffness of his gait, the way each rise of the sun drew the sweat tighter on his brow.

The seabirds’ cries dwindled until there was only the rasp of our own breath and the maddening whine of insects. My throat burned, every swallow raw. The coat clung to my back, and I longed already for the salt wind of the shore.

“Nothing yet,” he muttered, scanning each dry channel, each moss-dark hollow that promised more than it gave.

Holmes halted with sudden intensity, crouching low. A hollow in the rock ahead glistened dark, and for a heartbeat I thought salvation lay within. We hurried to it, my tongue already aching for relief.

But the pool was brackish, rimmed with green scum. The stench of rot struck us as we bent close, and a pale carcass of some seabird floated sodden at its edge. I turned away with my throat tighter than before. Holmes’s face gave nothing, but he ground his heel into the muck as though punishing it for mocking us.

Then he halted, hand raised. Half-buried in a snarl of vines, wedged against a stone, lay a barrel—weathered, staved, but unmistakably ours. He was upon it at once, tearing at the growth with his knife.

The cask was heavy, sloshing as we tilted it upright. He prised the bung with his blade. At first the smell of brine and tar, and then—impossible, blessed—the odour of fresh water.

I fell to my knees and cupped it in my hands, drinking greedily. It struck cold and sweet across my tongue, a pain almost as sharp as relief. Holmes allowed himself only a careful swallow, but the flicker in his eyes betrayed him.

“A single barrel,” he said, sealing it again. “But reprieve enough.”

We set out to drag it back together, our limbs trembling, shoulders afire. Each step was labour, but the knowledge of what we bore lent a strength born of desperation. Yet, we had not gone twenty yards before my legs gave way beneath me. The sand pitched up hard, and for a moment I lay there, the sky wheeling above and my throat rasping like a rasp against stone. Holmes was at my side at once, his hand hard under my arm.

“Steady,” he said, though his own breath was ragged. He bore more of the cask’s weight until I found my footing again. His grip was firm but wordless, and the silence between us stung sharper than rebuke.

When at last the thin smoke of our camp showed again, the sun was high and we were spent husks. We sank upon the sand, the barrel beside us. I did not speak of hope—but felt it in the way my lungs pulled a deeper breath, in how my hand lingered against the cool wood as if fearing it might vanish.

Dragging the barrel had wrung us near dry. My shoulders burned, my throat was raw with thirst despite the prize we carried, and when at last we stopped for breath I thought only of sinking into the sand. It was then Holmes’s gaze caught on a shape half-buried in the marram grass—a dark bulk, sodden, sullen, as if the tide itself had tried to smother it.

A chest. Battered, waterlogged, its lid swollen shut. Holmes gave a sharp cry and fell to his knees beside it, clawing at the sand with hands already split and bleeding. I joined him, and together we scraped and pulled until our nails tore and our breath came ragged. The thing seemed determined to stay in its shallow grave.

When at last we dragged it clear, it lay heavy and mute between us. The lock was rusted fast, mocking our first blows with a stone. My palms throbbed from the bruising when Holmes produced his knife. He forced the blade into the seam again and again until the wood groaned and split with a sound like bone giving way.

The stench that escaped was foul—mildew sweetened with rot, tar clinging at the back of my throat. For a dreadful instant I thought we had exhumed a coffin. Beneath sodden rags my fingers struck oilcloth, bound tight. Holmes tore it open with a grunt, and from the ruin came shapes at once humble and miraculous: bandages stiff but unspoiled, a squat jar of salve, bottles streaked and salt-crusted yet still bearing names I knew: quinine, laudanum, carbolic.

I touched them with a physician’s reverence, scarcely daring to believe. Here, at last, the sea had spared what mattered: the difference between wound and suppuration, fever and fever broken. Treasure indeed—but treasure hoarded from death itself.

“Providence, Watson,” Holmes said softly, watching me lift each bottle as though it were gold. “Not in jewels or coin, but in the only currency this island cannot mint.”

By the time the sun dipped low, the barrel was set by our pit and the chest beside it, the two of them squat sentinels of our fortune. I boiled a scant measure of water in our battered tin, if only to prove we might, and drank it warm and metallic as though it were civilisation itself returned.

Holmes bent to the ash to coax the embers alive once more. Flint struck steel with his usual economy—until his hand faltered. A spark fell wide, his jaw tightening against the tremor. He hissed a curse under his breath, sharp enough to startle me, and then bent again, forcing the flame into being.

It caught at last, and in an instant his composure was restored. I said nothing, but the sight clung to me: Holmes brittle as the fire he conjured from damp wood.

He stretched himself on the sand, collar open, a faint smile at his mouth. “Fire. Water. Medicine. We are further along than I dared imagine this morning. Add food and shelter, and we may yet contrive a life here.”

I sat opposite, the blaze painting our prizes in red and gold. My limbs ached, my throat rasped, yet I felt the faint stir of something I had not known since the storm began. Not hope, not yet—but its ghost, enough to hold me upright.

“Then we shall contrive it,” I said, resting a hand on the chest as though to keep it from vanishing back into the sand.

Holmes inclined his head, his eyes catching the firelight. “A narrow victory, but a victory. The experiment continues.”

The fire had settled to a low, steady glow, the surf hushed beyond, when the first sound split the night—sharp, guttural, unmistakable. A bark, then another, then the ragged chorus of a pack rising inland.

Holmes was on his feet at once, gaze flicking to the barrel and the chest as though already measuring how swiftly they might be hidden. The hair rose along my neck. I had heard that sound before, on Afghan nights, when the lean scavengers circled close, their hunger louder than their tread.

“They have scented us,” I said grimly. “And anything else the tide delivers.” The thought came unbidden—our shipmates cast up upon some lonely strand, their remains torn at by teeth and claw. I imagined the pack glutting themselves as the sea-lions had, bellies dragging through the sand, and the picture sickened me.

“Then we must make certain our bounty is not theirs.” Holmes’s tone was clipped, urgent. He seized the barrel’s end. “Help me—behind the wall.”

We rolled and dragged it together, wood grating softly on sand, and wedged it deep within the ruin’s shadow. The chest followed, and the hardtack still unopened. Each movement felt clumsy, too loud, the answering barks coming closer, sharp with feral eagerness.

When all was hidden we crouched again by the fire, banking its glow so it burned low and mean. The barking ebbed at last, drifting down the wind, but the silence it left pressed heavier than before.

Holmes folded his arms, eyes fixed on the dark. “Another note in the island’s symphony. We contend not only with want, Watson, but with rivals.”

I drew my coat tighter, the weight of our scant stores suddenly oppressive. “Then let us be cleverer than the dogs.”

His mouth twitched, no more than that. “Cleverer. And more determined. That is our task.”

We let the fire sink almost to ash, both of us watching the circle of dark beyond it. The barking was gone, yet the echo clung to the silence like a taunt. At length Holmes settled beside me, his shoulder brushing mine. No word passed, but the pressure lingered—less comfort than pact.

I did not move away. The warmth steadied me more than the embers could, though it did nothing to blunt the thought of what else the dogs might unearth before dawn. The island was not ours; it belonged to the scavengers. If we held fast, it was by inches, and only together.

Chapter Text

I woke to the thin light of a colourless dawn. I sat up, reflecting on how little colour there was anywhere in this place.

The rasp of Holmes coaxing breath from last night’s embers sounded in the quiet. The fire shuddered into life at last, a fragile flame that felt larger than it looked. Our barrel and the medicine chest crouched behind the broken wall like silent conspirators. They comforted the eye, yet did nothing for the hollow stone lodged in my gut. The thought of hardtack on my dry tongue was almost more than I could bear.

Holmes measured out our ration of fresh water with the care of a chemist handling poison. He tilted the bottle until two scant mouthfuls slipped over my tongue, then claimed the same for himself and stoppered it tight. The water was warm from the night, with a taste of wood and iron, but it steadied me nonetheless.

“We must spend the first strength of the day on food,” said Holmes. “Eggs if we can find them. Failing that, whatever swims.”

“You mean the nests in the rocks,” I said.

“I mean that hunger dulls judgement and robs a man of patience. Best meet it early.”

We climbed the head of beach where black stone shouldered up from the sand. Birds had claimed the cracks, the rock face streaked white with their tenancy. The wind struck harder there, sharp with kelp and salt. I shed my coat and hung it from a spur before edging down the ledge. Holmes watched, his gaze a mixture of calculation and concern he would never have named aloud.

The first hollow offered three nests: one nothing but shards, one a noisome ruin crawling with flies, the last holding two small eggs, pale as bone and flecked like blood.

“Alive?” Holmes called softly.

“Edible,” I answered.

“Then they are alive,” he said, satisfaction thin in his voice.

The next recess yielded a single egg and a parent that struck at my head with furious wings. I abandoned my hat and scrambled back clutching my prize. In all we gathered five, and each felt stolen more than found. Holmes marked the tally on a scrap of driftwood with a charred stick.

“Better than nothing, which is a poor diet,” he said.

“Doctor’s orders concur,” I answered, though the sight of them made my mouth water and my stomach knot.

We ate none. Arithmetic ruled harsher than appetite, and Holmes was merciless in its service. Instead he bent to driftwood and rope, lashing a broken knife-blade to a stave. The result was ugly but honest. He weighed it in his hands as a fencer does a foil.

“Fish do not argue,” he said. “They merely move. One must move before they do.”

We waded to the knees in a shallow cove where the water lay clear over black stone. The sun had climbed higher, a pale disc above a sky that would not brighten, and the cold water bit into the bones. My legs ached from the chill before we had even begun. Shadows flickered under us, quick and mocking, while Holmes stood with the spear poised, every muscle drawn into stillness. For a moment I almost believed hunger itself had stilled him. Then he struck cleanly, and the blade rang against stone, throwing a sheet of water into my face.

“Too slow,” he said, his smile brief and sharp with frustration.

We tried again, and again. Once I lunged at a flash of silver, but the shaft cut only water and the fish darted away with insolent ease. Twice Holmes slipped on weed-slick rock, plunging up to the hip with curses short and bitten off. Each time he rose slower. His breath rasped, his skin grey with cold. At last he pulled back, shivering, and regarded the spear as though it were a failed experiment.

“We expend more than we gain,” he said. “That is ruinous arithmetic.”

I, as a physician, had reached the same conclusion by other signs: our fingers white and useless, our legs trembling beneath us. We stumbled back to the fire, teeth set against the ache of it, and spread our sodden clothes where the heat might dry them. Only when the warmth began to creep into our bones did Holmes’s humour stir faintly. He scratched upon his slip of driftwood with a charred point: Fishing: impracticable. Devise net. Consider tide pools.

We took no food, only a mouthful each of water warmed in the tin, enough to dampen the roar of emptiness within. Already the day had shown its teeth. Behind us the jungle throbbed with insect life, and above us the sky was the blank, unblinking eye of the sea made air.

I looked at Holmes and thought him thinner already. There are signs a physician cannot help but read: cords standing out at the neck, hollows deepening beneath the cheekbone. Once his hand shook when he laid driftwood on the fire, and he drew it back quickly, as though the tremor belonged to the stick and not his body.

We turned our thoughts to shelter. Together we ringed the fire with stones and chose a place where the ruin gave us two walls against the wind. Holmes propped salvaged planks to dry in the sun so the dogs, should they come, would not drag them off. At the mouth of our sleeping nook he knotted a simple trip-line from the rope—no true defence, but it would scuff the sand and wake us if some curious beast pressed its nose too close.

In the afternoon we walked the strand again. The tide had fallen, showing a necklace of rock pools along the cliff’s foot. We crouched over them, more scavengers than boys, watching small worlds go about their business. Quick red crabs darted sidewise if we so much as breathed, and a limpet clung so fiercely to its stone that Holmes laughed once—low and thin—when even his knife could not shift it.

“A model citizen,” he said. “It goes nowhere and lets nothing in.”

“Nature favours the patient,” I said, though I thought not of limpets.

He glanced at me. “Nature favours what survives. Patience is only one weapon.”

He tried for the crabs barehanded and earned only wet sleeves and a flash of irritation. We left them to their rock-bound kingdoms. By late afternoon the wind had risen, and the waterline gleamed with a hard band of light. The island’s birds wheeled and cried above, indifferent masters of a realm where we moved clumsily and at cost.

We roasted the eggs on the coals at dusk. The shells blackened and split, releasing a smell so clean it made me dizzy. We ate in silence. I pushed the larger share toward Holmes and pretended I had not; he pretended not to notice the deceit, which was kinder.

Night fell as if a curtain had dropped. The dogs began when the first stars showed—not close, but not far. First sharp barks, then that broken, excited chorus which means they have taken a scent and are arguing it with voices that have never known restraint. The sound pulled me back at once to another country: a rocky wash, Afghan voices murmuring, firelight on yellow eyes at the edge of seeing. My hand went by instinct to my shoulder and found only cloth.

Holmes fed the fire until it leapt high. We could ill afford the fuel, yet it felt dearer to hoard courage than wood. He moved with deliberate care, checking the barrel and chest where they crouched behind the wall, confirming the trip-line, setting a crude torch within reach should we need to carry flame into the dark. When he returned he did not sit apart, as was his habit, but beside me. The fire’s heat made a hedge against fear that words could not.

“They will keep their distance,” he said at last. “Fire is a language even dogs understand.”

“So is hunger,” I said.

He inclined his head, listening. The barking swelled and ebbed, then faded, whether through caution or some other quarry I could not know. We let the flames settle lower, banking them with care. The stars sharpened, cold and innumerable. The surf answered with its own slow breath.

We lay close, more for survival than comfort, backs braced against the stone, coats drawn over us. I thought of how many times danger had sharpened Holmes’s mind, and how strange now to see his cleverness bent to rope, eggs, and driftwood. It seemed a humiliation, and then, at once, a kind of justice. Genius must earn bread like any other man.

A sudden scrabble at the trip-line snapped me upright. The rope twitched, scattering sand, and in the firelight I glimpsed the glisten of a crab’s carapace before it vanished into shadow. A small thing, harmless—yet my pulse raced as though it had been a prowling dog. The island seemed intent on reminding us that nothing here slept unchallenged.

Sleep came in fragments. Each time I woke I checked the glow of the fire, the line of rope, the barrel’s shadow. Each time I found Holmes wakeful too, eyes half-closed, listening. In one of those intervals his hand brushed my sleeve, a light pressure that said, without words, that we were still two. I left my hand where it was, and for a while the island’s vastness fell back.

The morning found us thin with fatigue. The fire had sunk to a fragile glow, the rain had left the sand clammy beneath our coats, and every joint mutinied when I rose. Holmes got to his feet with his usual abruptness, but I saw how long he steadied himself before leaving the wall. His hands were clasped behind his back—a familiar pose, though I thought now it was to still their tremor.

We broke our fast on a swallow of water apiece. The barrel sloshed, reassuring yet finite, and Holmes corked it with deliberate care. “The dogs will not trouble us by daylight,” he said. “That is our advantage. Today we test the forest.”

I strapped the tin to my belt, and he took the rope. He scored trunks with his knife and dragged its point across stones, leaving a trail of blazes like scars behind us. The air beneath the canopy was thick and wet; after the open strand it felt like another country, close and airless.

The jungle did not yield. Birds scattered at our approach, but their nests were high beyond reach. A cluster of fruit hung dark purple, dusted with bloom. Holmes plucked one, bit once, then spat it into the dirt with a grimace.

“Alkaloid bitterness. Likely purgative.”

I risked a taste and gagged at once. The pulp was chalk and gall. I spat, rinsed with the smallest sip from the tin, and wiped my lips with a sleeve already damp.

“Not today,” I said.

By noon the heat was merciless. The air pressed down like a sodden blanket. Flies clung to us, deaf to our swats. Holmes pressed on, muttering hoarsely—“soil damp here… drainage east… tree species suggest water nearby”—his stride faltering with each observation.

At last he staggered against a trunk, braced himself there, and closed his eyes. I caught his arm before he could fall. His skin burned beneath my hand.

“Enough,” I said. “You’ll do no good to either of us if you drop.”

For a moment I thought pride would rouse him against me. Then he gave a small, wry nod. “A tactical withdrawal, then. Even Caesar did not conquer every hill at once.”

We turned back along our blazed trail. I half-carried him the last stretch until the silver of the shore broke through the trees. My own legs shook under me, but fear for him lent me strength.

The sea gave us nothing but driftwood that day. We gathered it dutifully, each stick a coin in our dwindling purse. By afternoon the sky blackened and a squall swept the island. We scrambled to set tin and bottle beneath the streaming rock, catching what we could before the rain fled as suddenly as it came.

Soaked, shivering, yet exultant, we drank a mouthful each of the captured rain. It was thin, metallic with stone, but sweeter than wine. Holmes lifted the bottle in a ghost of a toast. “The island relents.”

The bottle filled quickly, but when we lifted it I saw grit and insect husks riding the surface. We drank all the same. The water was sweet beyond reckoning, yet each swallow carried the faint crunch of sand between the teeth, a reminder that even mercy here came spoiled.

That night we ate nothing. The fire hissed on wet wood, smoking before it caught. Holmes spoke of “pattern” and “probability,” his eyes fixed on the flames as though order might be found there. I listened until his words blurred into the surf.

The dogs were quieter—an occasional bark from far off, but no circling chorus. We lay close beneath the ruin’s shelter, too spent for speech. My mind drifted with half-dreams: storm winds, desert nights, Holmes’s pale face bent toward firelight. The island pressed close, and still we endured.

By the following morning, every motion felt stolen. My back ached as though I had slept on stone rather than sand; my knees cracked when I rose. Holmes, once a man of abrupt beginnings, lingered before the day: he shook his coat free of grit, smoothed it with needless precision, and only then raised his eyes to me. They were hollow, ringed dark from a night of broken sleep.

We drank our measured swallow of water in silence. The fire came back to life only with difficulty, the driftwood still wet from the storm. I thought of the eggs from our first day—how reverently we had eaten them—and cursed myself for not finding more. Hunger was no longer an annoyance; it was a stone lodged in the gut, grinding with every breath.

Holmes insisted on the shore. “The sea is less capricious than the jungle,” he said, though his voice was thinned by weariness. We followed the curve of sand eastward, eyes bent on the wrack-line. The wreck had all but vanished, only splinters rolling in the tide. A weight settled in my chest at the sight. It was as if the sea were erasing all trace of the world we had known, binding us to this one.

I stooped over a half-buried cask, the wood swollen and dark. With effort I prised it open, and for a moment my heart leapt at the sight of biscuit within. Yet the air that rose from it turned me at once: rank, sour, crawling with the pale squirm of infestation. I shut the lid quickly, though the taste seemed to cling in my throat. Holmes only marked the tally again, as though even corruption could be reduced to arithmetic.

We found little: a shard of plank, frayed cord, a tangle of seaweed that reeked of rot. Holmes examined it with the same attentiveness he once gave to rare reagents, then let it fall.

“Not worth the effort to dry,” he muttered. “Fuel and food alike betray us.”

When he straightened, I saw the cost. His hands shook faintly, and the sun revealed cheekbones sharpened like blades. He caught my gaze and stiffened, pride bracing against exhaustion.

“Watson,” he said curtly, “we must press inland again.”

By noon the heat was merciless. The air hung thick as wool. Holmes marked our trail with his knife, but the cuts grew shallow, uneven. Insects clung to our faces and hair, heedless of our blows. Each step into the green gloom leeched strength from my limbs.

Once Holmes stumbled outright, catching himself against a tree with a curse. I reached for him, but he waved me off.

“Only a moment’s dizziness,” he said, forcing steadiness. Yet sweat stood on his brow, and his breath rasped shallow.

The old helplessness came upon me—the surgeon with nothing to hand, no broth to fortify him, no quinine for the fever I half-feared I saw kindling. Only my presence. I pressed him to sit in the shade, and when pride rose to protest I laid a firm hand on his wrist. “You will rest, Holmes. The island is not conquered in a day.”

His eyes closed, his head fell back against the bark, and silence claimed him. For the first time since the storm, he seemed still.

When he pressed on again, swaying, I caught his arm. “No further, Holmes. You’ll kill yourself at this pace.”

His eyes flashed, pride flaring through exhaustion. “Better that than idleness. You would have me sit and rot?”

“Better rot in shade than bleed your strength where there is nothing to win,” I answered, sharper than I intended. For a breath we stood opposed, as if the island itself had set us against each other. Then the fire left him, and he allowed me to guide him back. But the moment lingered like a bruise.

We turned back empty-handed. The trek to the ruin was an ordeal. My legs dragged like lead, and Holmes leaned heavier than he would ever admit upon the staff he had cut.

That night we shared the last of our eggs. We divided it evenly over the coals. Holmes hesitated before swallowing his portion, then caught me watching and shot me a sharp look.

“Do not grow sentimental, Watson,” he said. “It is a poor diet.”

But when I pressed the larger piece into his hand he did not refuse. He ate in silence, and afterward sat beside me at the fire with his shoulder just brushing mine. No more was said, yet the weight of his nearness gave me more strength than speech.

I had seen hunger strip men of temper and reason alike, leaving them brittle as glass. I wondered, not without dread, what shape it would carve in Holmes if the days stretched further without relief. His genius had ever been a blade; I feared what edge it might take if turned upon himself—or upon me.

The fire was meagre, our fuel nearly gone. The night pressed close with its chorus of insects, the sigh of surf, the occasional bark far off. I lay half-dozing, half-wakeful, listening to Holmes’s breathing steady beside me.

For the first time I wondered whether we would live to see another dawn. The thought was bitter, yet I held it, because to deny it seemed more dangerous still.

The fire had dwindled to a whisper of ash when I woke. A grey dawn spread over the sea, pale and merciless, and the ruin about us felt colder than any night before. My limbs were stiff, my mouth ached with dryness, my stomach a hollow drum that answered every breath.

Holmes was already upright, pacing with that restless energy that seemed to gnaw at him even as his body failed. He had eaten no more than I, yet his mind fed on the problem itself, worrying it with the same tenacity the dogs gave their prey.

“We cannot live on eggs and driftwood,” he said, half to himself. “There must be a resource concealed in the island’s rhythm, some pattern we have yet to read.”

I pushed myself upright, swaying as the blood returned to my head. The morning air was sharp in my chest, the surf relentless at the stones. I followed his gaze inland, where the forest loomed—dark, silent, impenetrable. My heart sank at the thought of forcing our way into it once more.

Then I saw it. A thin thread rising above the trees, faint but unwavering. Not the ragged smear of lightning-struck brush, but a column that climbed with purpose. Smoke.

“Holmes,” I croaked, and seized his arm to steady myself as much as to point. “There—look.”

He froze. His eyes narrowed, following the pale line against the dawn. For a long moment he said nothing. He studied it with that hawk-like stillness I had seen in Baker Street when a clue revealed itself—yet here, hunger had sharpened his face to the bone, and the intensity bordered on fever.

“Not chance,” he said at last. “Not storm. Not accident. That, Watson, is human.”

Relief struck first, then dread, the two entwined so closely I could not tell them apart. We were not alone on this merciless shore—yet the knowledge chilled as much as it steadied.

Holmes’s hand closed briefly over mine where it gripped his sleeve, a pressure firm and fleeting. “The island has shown its first true sign. Our exile is no longer solitary.”

The smoke wavered in the pale sky, a quiet herald of the unknown. We stood side by side, the sea at our backs, the wilderness before, and felt the day sharpen like a blade.

Chapter Text

The sight of that smoke altered the tenor of our silence. The past days had been consumed with fire, water, and the bare mechanics of survival; now each gesture was bent to preparation, as if the air itself demanded it.

“We cannot walk into the unknown as beggars,” Holmes said. Hunger had worn his voice thin, but a sharpness returned to it now, like steel drawn from a scabbard. “We will need proof of value—tools, knowledge, bargaining pieces if need be. And above all, Watson—medicine.”

Together we unearthed the small chest from its hiding place. I examined each bottle in turn: the laudanum catching the light like amber, the carbolic’s cork resisting my pull, the stiff bandages and salve still intact. I packed them with the reverence of a soldier counting cartridges, knowing these small relics might prove dearer than gold.

Holmes looped the rope over his shoulder, stowed the battered tin at his belt, and slipped the charred tally-stick into his coat as though it, too, bore weight in this grim arithmetic. He lingered over the barrel of water, siphoning a measure into the glass bottle and corking it tight.

We doused the embers, shouldered our burden, and turned our steps inland toward the column of smoke that beckoned above the trees. The air grew thicker, the ground more treacherous, roots clutching at our boots. The forest pressed close, alive with the cries of unseen creatures, its shadows restless.

The way was slow and punishing. Vines snared our legs, branches clawed our coats, and every yard gained seemed only to sink us deeper into the green. Once, as we forced our way through a tangle of vines, my boot struck something half-buried in the soil. I bent and found the rusted spring of a trap, teeth splayed and useless with age. Later we passed a stump cut square, its rings long grey with rot. These were no accidents of nature but the ghosts of industry, hints that others had labored here long before us.

Holmes saw them too; the tightness at his mouth told me as much. The smoke no longer felt like promise, but summons.

We paused often to catch breath and mark our trail, Holmes scoring the bark of various trees surrounding us in quick, practiced strokes. Sweat ran into my eyes, and the medicine chest dragged at my arms like a stone.

“Not close,” he murmured, wiping his brow. “That smoke rose steady, deliberate. Whoever tends it has been long about the work.”

I nodded, too winded to reply. The insects seemed to gather with purpose, biting to drive us back. Still we pressed on, the smoke-line our guiding star.

At length the forest’s voice began to change. Birdsong thinned, then ceased altogether, leaving only the rasp of our own breath. Holmes halted, head cocked, every sense alive.

A shout cracked the stillness. German, the cadence sharp and unmistakable.

Another answered from our flank, clipped, commanding.

Men stepped from the undergrowth, not phantoms as my fevered brain may have expected, but gaunt Europeans, hardened by long exile. Their coats still clung to the memory of uniform braid or scholar’s frock, though the cloth was little more than tatters. Faces were leathered by sun, eyes fever-bright, beards ragged. Their weapons were improvised but carried like old companions: a bayonet lashed to a spar, a hammer blackened with use, knives filed to slivers and bound with cord. They spread with the rough precision of men long drilled, forming a half-ring that shut us in.

The leader, scar pale across his jaw, stood like a sergeant still. He barked a question in harsh German, his cutlass jerking toward us.

Holmes’s gaze flicked over them, his voice pitched low. “Shipwrecked, like ourselves. But longer here. And armed by suspicion.”

Their eyes fixed on the chest in my grip, then slid to the bottle at Holmes’s belt. The air went taut.

Another shout cracked, sharper now. A man surged forward, club raised, striking not out of frenzy but fear made reflex. Holmes caught his wrist, twisted; the weapon dropped with a cry. At once the ring tightened, bodies pressing in like a closing snare.

I heaved the chest up and drove it into a man’s ribs. Pain flared through my arms at the impact; he staggered but another was already on me, knee slamming into my stomach. The chest tore from my hands as I pitched to the dirt, breath gone, mouth full of soil.

Through the haze I saw Holmes moving with brutal economy: a hand to the throat, a sidestep that turned steel aside, a boot heel crushing down. Each strike landed clean — but there were too many. A blow from behind folded him; a club hammered his shoulder and drove him to one knee.

I lurched up, half-blind, and threw myself at the man lifting steel above him. He swatted me down with contemptuous ease, the blade flashing toward my throat.

Holmes’s breath rasped. He went still, hands rising slow, open. The fight drained from him not as surrender but as calculation. “Enough,” he said, voice hoarse yet steady.

The scarred leader stared long, weighing us like cargo. Around him men muttered, boots prodding the chest, a hand shaking the bottle from Holmes’s belt. Suspicion had not eased; it had merely found its mark. Another barked order followed, final as a verdict.

Rough hands seized me, wrenching my arms back until the sockets burned. The rope bit quick and deep, coarse fibers grinding into skin. I jerked once, uselessly, before the knot cinched tight.

Beside me they bound Holmes. He did not resist, only raised his head until his eyes caught mine. His jaw was set like iron, yet his gaze drifted lower, lingering on the awkward drag of my step, the scrape of boot against root. The ropes bit into his wrists until the skin reddened, but still he measured my gait more than his own fetters, as though the pain he bore was nothing beside the stumble he foresaw in me.

We were shoved forward, the path crueler than before, stones jagged, roots rearing like traps. I stumbled almost at once, pitching to my knee. A guard snarled, club raised high to drive me on.

Holmes lunged sideways, rope biting into his wrists, and hurled his shoulder into the man’s chest. The guard staggered back, but another rushed in, swinging the musket butt with brutal finality.

The crack of wood on bone was sickening. Holmes reeled, blood springing bright across his brow, and collapsed in the dirt. My cry tore free, raw, before a fist knotted in my collar and dragged me upright.

He forced himself back to his feet, swaying, blood dripping into his eye. His jaw was set still, but his balance wavered, head giving the faintest tilt as though the earth itself betrayed him.

The scarred leader barked a command and cuffed his own man aside, a harsh rebuke. Yet the gesture did not comfort me. It was not mercy, only discipline. One guard shoved Holmes forward; another struck him back with the flat of his hand, sharp, as if to say: keep him upright, he must walk.

So they drove us on, harsher now. The smoke that had seemed salvation at dawn curled higher above the trees, a black finger beckoning us deeper. But its promise was drowned for me in the crimson streaking Holmes’s temple, and in the dread that hope itself had lured us into hands ruled by suspicion.

We stumbled on under rough prods and shoves, the ropes at our wrists burning raw. The forest pressed close, then began to thin, and woodsmoke thickened on the air. Not the bright tang of driftwood, but the sour, clinging reek of hearths.

The trees thinned and broke at last into a clearing. A palisade of driftwood and salvaged timber ringed the settlement, grey as old bone and bristling with sharpened stakes. Beyond it squatted huts patched with sailcloth and tar, their seams oozing smoke. Stone chimneys leaned like stunted towers. A battered table sat in the open, its surface scored by years of knives. Nets sagged between posts, their cords mended more than woven, and broken barrels slumped in heaps along a wall.

At the camp’s center, raised almost reverently on blocks, loomed the hull of a longboat long since split and rotted, its ribs splayed to the sky like a skeleton bleached in the sun. Moss clung to its planks, and offerings of rope, bone, and shell had been tucked into the cracks, as though this carcass of wood had become shrine as much as ruin.

There was order here still, but that order frayed thin. Cook fires smoked over scraps of bone. A garden plot lay stripped and strangled by weeds, its fence half-collapsed. Faces turned at our arrival: men and women hollow-cheeked, skin stretched tight, eyes dulled not with ignorance but with the weary calculation of those too often disappointed by hope.

When we crossed the threshold of the clearing, movement flickered. A child stood barefoot in the dirt, legs stick-thin beneath a torn shift. Her stare fixed on us, wide, unblinking. For a heartbeat Holmes’s gaze met hers, something softer breaking through the blood and the bandage. Then a woman’s hand clamped down, dragging the child back into shadow. No cry escaped her, only eerie silence, sharper than any shout.

As the woman dragged the child away, another figure came into view—a woman a bit older than the mother, though not old herself. She did not shrink back as the others did. Her dress was little more than rags, yet she carried herself upright, the planes of her face set in sharp lines that hunger had not softened.

Her gaze fixed on me, not fleeting but steady, unblinking, as though she weighed something far beyond the sight of a stranger in chains. It was not the curiosity of the half-starved, nor the fear that flickered in other eyes. It was colder, more exacting, as if she studied me the way one might study a specimen on a tray.

I felt the prickle of it even as we were shoved forward, her eyes following long after the child’s silence had vanished into shadow.

Holmes’s eyes moved over it all. His voice was pitched low, meant for me alone. “They have endured here long, Watson,” he said. “But not well.”

Orders rang out behind us. The chest was wrenched from my arms and thrust into the scarred leader’s hands. He prised it open, and at the sight of bottles still sealed, bandages unspoiled, his eyes flared with a hunger keener than for bread. Words rattled from him, excitement stirring through the circle, but even in that ripple their gazes cut back to us, heavy with mistrust.

The ropes at our wrists jerked tight, splitting skin raw. We were driven toward the longboat, dragged like spoils before the hollow faces. Smoke drifted acrid across the clearing, and my stomach clenched: this was no rescue, but a tribunal.

At last they thrust us into a hut at the settlement’s edge — warped planks, sailcloth patched thin, roof sagging with damp. The floor was bare earth, hard as stone, the air rank with mildew and old smoke. Knives sawed through the cords; the door slammed. Darkness closed in.

Holmes dropped to his knees the instant the ropes fell away, hands trembling as they pressed to his brow. Blood had slicked his face from the head wound, bright even in the dim, tracing down through the stubble on his jaw.

“You fool,” I muttered, falling beside him, my own wrists raw and burning. My fingers tore at empty pockets, hunting for cloth that was not there. “You should have let them strike me.”

His mouth curved faintly, though his voice was rough. “A man does not watch his comrade felled like an ox.”

The defiance ebbed almost at once. He swayed, and I caught him, feeling the tremor through his frame. Tilting his head back, I parted the matted hair. The wound was shallow, yes, but scalp bled like an opened vein, hot and steady against my palm. The sight of it turned my stomach even as habit kept my hands firm.

I ripped a strip from my sleeve with my teeth and bound one hand tight to the wound, pressing hard. He hissed, jaw clamped, eyes gone unfocused — staring past me into the shadows, the way a man stares too long into fire.

“Stay with me,” I whispered. “I’ll not have you slipping now.”

“I never swoon,” he murmured, and the corner of his mouth twitched in a ghost of wry protest, though the effort cost him dearly.

I poured the last of our water over the cloth, working slow and steady, washing the blood away in thin pink rivulets. The sting drew a tremor through him; when I pressed firmer to staunch the flow, his hand shot up and closed on my forearm with startling strength. 

At last the bleeding eased. I wound the strip tight about his brow and knotted it at his temple. The bandage sat crooked, making him look absurdly boyish, like a schoolmaster’s pupil cuffed for mischief — yet even that faint absurdity could not mask the pallor beneath. As the knot cinched, colour crept back to his lips, his breathing steadied. Only then did I dare to draw back, though my own pulse hammered as if I had run a mile.

He gave a faint nod of thanks — and then his head sagged forward, the weight of it suddenly too much. Panic jolted through me. I caught his face between my palms.

“Holmes.”

His eyes fluttered open, steadied, but the weakness beneath them was raw. His breath rasped shallow, his hand trembled where it clung still to my sleeve.

I fumbled at my coat, fingers closing on the small vial I had kept strapped there since we first came ashore: laudanum, precious as coin. The glass glimmered faintly in the dim.

Holmes saw it and shook his head at once, the motion slight but resolute. “No. Too dear. Save it.”

“You’re bleeding out your strength,” I said, my thumb worrying at the cork, my other hand firm beneath his jaw. “I’ll not watch you topple because you hoard what’s meant to keep you upright.”

His lips twitched in a ghost of defiance. “I’ve survived on less.”

“And I’ll not have you test the theory tonight,” I snapped, harsher than I intended. His eyes flickered at my tone, but the fight dimmed from them. At last, with a long breath that trembled at its close, he inclined his head.

I tipped a scant measure between his lips. He swallowed, grimacing, then shut his eyes. My hand lingered at his temple until the tension slackened from his grip.

For a wild instant I longed to lean close, to press my lips to the heat of his brow. But the walls were thin, and the dark seemed alive with unseen eyes and ears. I clenched the urge down, leaving it unsaid, unfelt save in the ache of restraint.

The hut sank into silence, broken only by our uneven breathing. Outside, muffled voices stirred, a cough torn raw, the dull spit of fire. Each sound seemed sharpened by the hush, as though the camp itself leaned in to listen.

Holmes eased back against the wall, bandage askew, his eyes half-lidded. I watched the slow rise and fall of his chest until at last he spoke, voice dry as ash. “You see, Watson—our welcome is warmer than I predicted.”

“Warmer?” The word tore out harsher than I meant. “You are bleeding, half-faint, and we are penned like beasts.”

His mouth curved faintly. “Yes. Just so.” He turned his head, the pale grey of his eyes catching what little lamplight filtered through the cracks. “But we are alive. They might have left us in the forest to rot.”

I let out a breath I had not known I held. “That is mercy of a kind.”

“Mercy,” he echoed, rolling the word as though it tasted of iron. His gaze fell to my wrists, raw and welted, then slid closed again, not only from fatigue, but from thought. “Suspicion is the last coin left to men who have starved too long. But it is a brittle one. They will spend it quickly.”

His words hung between us like smoke. I wanted to tell him how his reckless lunge for me had shaken me—how I would take the blows a hundred times before I watched him fall. But the words clotted in my throat. Instead I pressed a hand to his arm, steady, the only language left to me.

He did not pull away.

The door scraped open at last. A man, introduced as Ritter, stood framed in the light, scar stark across his jaw, eyes hard with the habit of command. At his shoulder was the woman—sharp-eyed, unsmiling, her posture straighter than his, as though she carried more than her own weight. She studied us for a long moment, then bent to murmur something low in German. Ritter’s reply was a growl and an oath. He spat to the side, turned on his heel, and stalked away.

She remained. “Come,” she said, her voice measured, the syllables careful. “You will talk.”

Holmes pushed himself upright, his weight heavy against me, and we were marched across the clearing to a hut stouter than the rest. Its seams leaked smoke, its tarred roof gleamed slick with damp. Inside, the air was close with boiled grain and sour wool, the acrid bite of old fires sunk into the boards.

She motioned us down. A basin of water was set at my feet. I tore another strip from my shirt and bent to Holmes’s wound, rinsing blood from his temple. The water pinked at once. He bore the cloth pressed firm, though I felt the tremor in his shoulders and saw the tightness in his eyes.

The woman did not look away. When I tied off the bandage, she reached and brushed her fingers against the stained rag. Her gaze lifted to mine, sharp, searching. “Doctor,” she said slowly, as if tasting the word. “You are a doctor?”

Holmes’s eyes flickered to me, sharp despite the haze. 

Her mouth curved, and the stiffness of her speech slipped away. English came quick now, fluent and exact. “Of course you are. And you...” her gaze slid to Holmes, weighing him. "Plainly no sailor. London clings to you both still.”

The walls of the hut seemed to press in. Holmes sat very still, eyes narrowing beneath the bandage. “Then you have understood us all along.”

She inclined her head, a flicker of rue shadowing her mouth. “We did. Forgive the manner of your capture. Hunger makes men rash. And strangers…” Her fingers tightened briefly on the basin’s rim. “…strangers have meant ruin before.”

Holmes’s voice was low, dry. “Suspicion is not unreasonable. But your welcome was… emphatic.”

Her eyes did not waver. “Once, years past, another band came ashore. They spoke fair, with promises. Within a month half our stores were gone, and they vanished into the forest. That winter we buried children.” Her voice thinned but did not break. “So tell me, what would you expect my people to see when two armed men walked from the trees?”

Her gaze shifted back to me. “But you are a doctor. That changes much. Sickness runs in the camp, and I have done what I can, but it is not enough. If you help us, you will not be harmed again.”

Holmes drew a slow breath, not assent so much as recognition. “A pragmatic welcome.”

“A necessary one,” she said simply. “Better apology than a grave.”

She rose, brushed her palms against her skirt. “My husband will speak with you at sunset. Until then, rest here. You are not prisoners now, but the men will watch you. For their peace of mind—and yours.”

Two guards stepped into the doorway as she finished, shadows cut against the light. Their weapons hung low but ready, edges worn bright from long handling. One shifted his grip on the haft, the movement small but deliberate, as though to remind us where power lay. The other’s gaze never left Holmes, sharp and measuring, his jaw working slow as if chewing on judgment.

They did not speak. The silence pressed heavier than words. I felt their eyes as a weight, as if every gesture—the basin at my knees, the strip of cloth knotted at Holmes’s temple—was being tallied against some unseen ledger.

The woman gave me the briefest nod. “See to him.” Then she was gone, skirts brushing past the guards as if they were pillars set in place.

The doorway closed them in but not their presence. Boots scuffed against the packed earth, a cough rasped low, and still the sense of their watchfulness seeped through the planks. The camp’s hunger murmured outside, but it was the silence of those two men—patient, heavy, implacable—that set my skin to prickle.

After a time the door scraped open again. One of the younger men entered, gaunt as the rest, bearing a chipped bowl and a bundle of cloth. He set them down without a word, his eyes flicking to Holmes, then to the empty basin where blood had clouded the water. The smell of thin broth drifted up, fish and root vegetables. The bundle proved to be clothes: coarse shirts and trousers, stiff with old salt, yet dry and less torn than what we wore.

He lingered only a moment, gaze sharp, then withdrew. The door shut, and the guards’ shadows lengthened across the threshold once more.

Holmes leaned back against the boards, eyes half-lidded. The bandage I had tied stood out stark in the smoke-hazed light, a pale flag of how narrowly he had been spared.

“But hunger has worn civility to threads,” he said at last, his voice quiet, roughened.

I swirled the basin idly, the water clouding red as it caught the lamplight. “They could have finished us in the forest.”

“And instead they have given us a part to play,” he replied. “Which is both reprieve and peril.” His gaze flicked to me, sharp despite the fatigue dragging at him. “You will be in their hands as much as they are in yours, Watson. Remember that.”

I did not answer. The weight of eyes pressed through the walls—guards at their posts, settlers beyond, all measuring us as they might weigh salt or grain. My hand found his arm and rested there. He did not move away.

Outside, the camp muttered on: coughing, a child’s thin cry, the scrape of a dull tool against wood. No voices rose in laughter or song. Only survival spoke here.

We lay down at last on the mats they had left for us. The guards shifted once more outside, patient as stones. Sleep came fitful, burdened not by waves or weather, but by the knowledge that we were no longer adrift. We were bound—to these strangers, to their hunger, to their wary hope.

One guard paced a steady rhythm, boots grinding the dirt with each turn; the other set stone to blade, the scrape long and slow, carrying through the thin planks. I lay listening, every sound a reminder that sleep was no refuge. We were watched, measured, weighed, until even in darkness their presence pressed on my skin.

Chapter Text

Morning broke thin and grey, the light filtering through the cracks in the hut as though reluctant to enter. A knock came at the door—not the sharp jab of suspicion we had known the night before, but a steady rap. When it opened, Klara herself stood there, her face drawn as parchment, her eyes hollow but unflinching. She handed us each a wooden bowl of broth so pale it was scarcely more than hot water with a few errant grains floating like debris.

I drank mine without question; hunger gave it flavour. Holmes only sipped politely, then set the bowl aside. His expression was unreadable, but when Klara had gone he nudged it toward me without comment. “Better that it serve some use,” he murmured, as though dismissing it. I knew well enough he had eaten less than I in days.

Outside, the camp was quieter in daylight than I had expected. Smoke crawled low from cookfires, stinging my eyes. Men crouched over torn nets, their fingers moving mechanically through frayed strands that dissolved at every tug. Others split driftwood, each swing of the axe slow, as though the wood absorbed what strength they had left. Women bent over steaming pots or scoured rags at a trough, their movements stripped of chatter. Children huddled at their skirts, too thin and subdued even to squabble.

As we walked, heads turned. No voice hailed us, no hand rose in greeting. Their eyes measured us instead, as one might weigh a coin whose worth was uncertain. Not open hostility, but a suspicion heavy enough to chill the air.

My work began at once. A boy of ten was carried to me, his chest rattling like loose stones, his skin slick with fever. His mother’s grip was fierce enough to bruise; she seemed to think sheer force could anchor him in the world. I cooled his brow with water, pressed cloths to his chest, murmured assurances I barely believed. His eyes rolled, lips parted for breath that seemed always just beyond his reach.

Later came a woman with a leg ulcer, the flesh swollen and cracked, heat radiating from the wound like a slow fire. I washed it as best I could, bound it with torn cloth steeped in a crude salve. The smell of it, rot already setting in, clung to my hands long after.

Two infants followed, their ribs visible as bowstrings under skin, their coughs so violent I feared they would tear themselves apart. I could only ease their breathing, comfort their mothers, and pray their bodies did not betray them overnight.

It was crude work, far from the instruments and medicines I had once commanded—work that recalled the field stations of war, where hope and cloth stood in place of skill and steel. Here too I was reduced to water, rags, and prayer. Yet still, some faint thaw showed itself: a whispered “Danke” from a woman who would not meet my eye, the loosening of a mother’s fingers, the nod of a man at the doorway. Not gratitude as I had known it in London, but the barest flicker of trust in a place where trust itself had withered.

Holmes moved about the camp in his own fashion, as keen in hunger as in health. I saw him stoop by the garden plot, no more than churned earth and weeds, his fingers tracing a rotted fence-post. “A year abandoned, at least,” he murmured. Later, crouched by the palisade, he pressed his hand to a seam where two planks met. “Crude joinery, patched often, not recent.”

He watched the men at their nets, counted their axes lying dull at their feet, marked the longboat stripped to its bones. When I asked what he saw, he only said, “Every fracture has a story. Theirs runs long.”

By afternoon he returned to me, his eyes still sharp but his voice pitched lower, edged with weariness. “This camp is held together by habit, not strength. One harsh winter, one quarrel too far, and it collapses. Remember that, Watson.” His hand rose, almost reluctant, to the bandage at his brow. The linen had spotted through again, and in the narrowing of his gaze I read the pain he would not confess. “If you would...” He let the words trail off, trusting me to finish them.

I guided him to a bench outside the hut, my fingers working gently at the knot. He bowed his head beneath my hands, the posture uncharacteristic, almost vulnerable. 

I kept my movements steady, though my pulse beat fast. His breath stirred, and once, when I touched the raw edge of the cut, I felt him flinch, not from mistrust, but from the effort of holding still for me. It struck me then how rare it was for him to yield, how much was folded into that wordless assent. For a moment I felt the weight of his trust more keenly than the fragility of the cloth I wound about him.

As I finished, one of the settlers passed by, shoulders hunched, clutching a sodden notebook to his chest. He did not pause, but his eyes flicked once toward us, sharp and assessing, before he turned away. The look unsettled me. There had been no expression in it, only the cold acknowledgement of one who had seen something private and stored it away.

When the bandage was secure, Holmes straightened with a briskness that belied the tremor in his limbs. His hand lingered against mine for an instant before he turned back toward the huts, his expression already shuttered.

I looked to where my other patients lay. Children coughing into their mothers’ shoulders, women staring past me as though the day itself offered nothing worth seeing. “They know it already,” I said.

Holmes’s gaze lingered on the settlement, smoke drifting across his profile. “Yes,” he answered. “And they are waiting for the rope to snap.”

That evening we were invited—no, required—to sit at the common meal. The fire had been raised in the camp’s center, its smoke climbing through the ribs of the ruined longboat that loomed above like a shrine to better days, weathered and skeletal. Around it the settlers gathered in a rough circle, bowls in hand, perched on overturned casks, splintered planks, or simply the packed earth. Children clung to their mothers with wide, hollow eyes, their silence more disturbing than any cry might have been.

A pot of thin stew simmered by the fire’s edge. When ladled into bowls it revealed itself to be little more than boiled roots and a phantom trace of fish. Holmes and I received ours without a word.

No one spoke. The scrape of spoons against wood, the crack of shifting timber, the rasping cough of the sick—these were the only sounds. Faces swam in and out of the firelight: gaunt, watchful, suspicion written into every shadow. The silence pressed down heavier than hunger itself.

At last it was broken, not by welcome, but by intrusion.

A man lounged a little apart, just beyond the ring of firelight, as if refusing the company he shared. The flames touched him in fragments: first a shoulder, then the line of a jaw, leaving most of him claimed by shadow. His hair was lighter than most, hacked short with a dull blade; his coat, though frayed to threads, bore the ghost of finer cloth. He leaned against an upturned cask with insolent ease, posture deliberate, as though to remind them—and us—that he did not labour as they did. A half-smile twisted his mouth as he leaned forward, letting the fire catch in his eyes.

“Guests at our table,” he said in fluent English, his tone sly and carrying too far across the hush. “How long has it been since we enjoyed that privilege?”

No one answered. Ritter’s scarred gaze fixed on him across the flames, flat and implacable. Klara’s hand stilled on her bowl, though she did not look up. A few of the others shifted on their seats, but none spoke.

The man’s smile widened. “Kappel,” he offered, bowing with mock courtesy where he sat. “That is my name—though here it is often spoken with less charity. You see how it is, gentlemen. They endure, they scrape, they toil. And they despise me because I remind them it will never be enough.”

His words rang too loudly, striking the camp like stones against glass. A child whimpered and was hushed. One of the men fixed his eyes on the stew as if the bowl itself might save him from notice.

Kappel let the silence stretch, then turned his gaze deliberately, first to Holmes, then to me. “Perhaps you will fare better. Or perhaps you will find, as I did, that gratitude sours more quickly than hunger.”

Holmes’s eyes narrowed, measuring, but he gave no reply.

The circle seemed to draw in upon itself, the way a wounded animal coils around pain. Spoons scraped, firewood shifted, coughs shivered in the dark. Yet no one looked at another. The meal ended as it had begun: in silence. The fire spat, the smoke curled upward, and all about me I felt the scaffolding of order sway, stretched and splintered—one word from collapse.

By the second full day in the settlement, their faces grew clearer to me—no longer a faceless band, but weary souls, each bent under a different weight.

There was Ernst, once a sailor. His shoulders bore the knots of old rope burns, ridged scars that told of strength long spent. He sat for hours with his nets, fingers working with the grim patience of a man for whom there is nothing left but the motion. Yet the sea gave him nothing. I watched him haul the mesh dripping and bare, shake his head without surprise, and coil it again. His eyes were steady, too steady: the gaze of one who counts every morsel shared and withheld, who never forgets what another man eats.

Greta moved among the camp with two children clinging always to her skirts. The elder coughed until his lips went blue, and she pressed him tight against her breast, rocking, whispering a lullaby so faint it was hardly more than breath. Once, when I brought her a cup of broth, she looked up and smiled. The smile cracked her face like dry earth under rain, showing for an instant the woman she must once have been. The glimpse vanished as quickly as it came, leaving her eyes shadowed and her arms trembling with the weight she carried.

Hans the carpenter had palms split and swollen, scars crisscrossing them like a map of every tool he had wielded too long. He showed Holmes the broken palisade one afternoon, running his thumb along the warped planks as if they were wounds he had tended and lost. His German was low, bitter. Holmes only nodded, his eyes tracing the lines of weakness. Later he told me, “The walls hold nothing out, Watson. They are a fiction, and fictions cannot keep hunger at bay.”

Klara moved through it all like mortar through crumbling stone. She knelt with the sick beside me, steadied quarrels with a word, pressed bowls into children’s hands before the men could reach for them. There was no show in her labours, no ceremony, only the relentless effort of one who knew the camp would splinter if she faltered for even a moment.

Ritter ruled otherwise. His was not command by kindness but by silence. His scarred jaw told enough stories to quiet the rest. When he passed, men lowered their eyes, children hushed, even dogs slunk aside. Authority clung to him not as trust but as gravity—heavy, inescapable, indifferent to love or hate.

And always there was Kappel. He did not work, and they did not force him. He drifted on the camp’s edges, speaking only when his words could cut. His hair was lighter, his bearing less broken, his accent softer, and suspicion clung to him like a second skin. Yet he seemed almost to enjoy the part, wearing their loathing as armour.

“You see why they despise me,” he said once, when we fetched water from the cask together. His smile was sly, but I caught hollowness beneath it. “I remind them they are prisoners here. I refuse to bow, so they call me enemy. Perhaps they are right.”

Later, Holmes watched him slip back into the shadows at the camp’s edge. “An outsider may endure among the starving, Watson,” he said quietly, “but not without a price. Men who provoke without fear rarely live without consequence. Mark him.”

That afternoon they brought me the boy again, the one whose chest had rattled like loose stones the day before. His mother clutched him so tightly her knuckles had gone bloodless, her face set in the mask of someone who already knew the verdict but demanded a reprieve all the same.

I laid him down on a pallet by the fire. His skin burned under my hand, yet his lips had gone the colour of slate. Each breath came shallow and ragged, dragging at his narrow frame until his ribs showed like spars through torn canvas. I tried what little I had: cool cloths at his brow, a draught of thin broth, my palm against his chest as though I could steady the failing rhythm by force of will alone.

For a fleeting moment his eyes opened. They were startlingly clear, wide with the bewilderment of a child too young to comprehend that breath might betray him. He seemed to stare past me, as though some presence had caught his gaze in the rafters above. Then the sound in his chest stuttered—and ceased.

His mother did not scream and she did not cry. She bent over him, pressed her lips into his hair, and rocked him in silence. Her shoulders shook, but no sound escaped. Around us the camp seemed to hold itself still. Greta’s youngest whimpered until she pressed him against her skirts. Ernst crossed himself with the slow solemnity of a man marking a tally he could not refuse. Klara knelt and laid her hand on the woman’s arm, but the mother did not look up.

I tried to speak—some useless words of comfort, some promise that could not be kept—but when her eyes met mine, the words shrivelled on my tongue. There was no accusation in them, no plea, not even gratitude. Only the hollow knowledge of one who had expected nothing more.

At last she rose, lifting the boy’s body as if he weighed no more than a bundle of cloth. No one moved to stop her. She walked back to her hut without a sound, and the door closed behind her with the finality of a stone dropped into a well.

The camp did not resume its labour at once. The silence thickened, pressing into every corner. The fire spat, a pot boiled over, a child coughed until he retched. Only then did the motions of survival begin again—mechanical, joyless, as if performed by shadows rather than men and women.

I washed my hands in the trough, though there was no blood on them, only the memory of stillness. The water clouded with ash, and for a moment I thought it was the boy’s last breath rising again, only to be lost in the air.

Holmes came to me then, his face unreadable, though the briefest brush of his fingers at my sleeve betrayed what words could not.

In the evening we were seated again at the common meal. By then I had begun to see more in their silence: Ernst sat close at Ritter’s side, a shadow of loyalty; Greta kept her children pressed against her knees, shielding them as though from every glance; Klara’s eyes moved often to Hans, steadying him when his bitterness threatened to crack through the hush.

The stew was thinner than before, stretched with roots and little else. The steam that rose from it carried no scent at all. Silence hung as it always did, oppressive and airless, broken only by the scrape of spoons and the rattle of coughs.

Kappel’s voice cut it apart. “A feast, is it not?” he said, his tone too smooth, pitched to carry across the ring. His eyes found me. “You must tell us, doctor—is this what Londoners eat when they dine at their clubs?”

A few shifted uneasily. Ritter’s scarred jaw clenched, though he kept his silence.

Kappel leaned back, savoring the discomfort as though it were wine. “They pretend not to hear me,” he told Holmes, his voice raised just enough. “But they hear. They always hear. And so will you.”

Holmes regarded him with the faintest tilt of the head, as if he were nothing more than an insect pinned beneath glass. “Indeed,” he said, and lowered his gaze to his bowl.

The fire spat, smoke curling into the dark. Around us the settlers ate quickly, draining their bowls with eyes fixed on the ground. Not one looked at another. Only Klara met my gaze across the flames. Her expression was weary but intent, as if to warn me: do not answer him.

I lay long awake that night, listening to the camp breathe around us. The coughing of children, the occasional mutter of a man, the dull crack of wood in the fire—all of it seemed part of the same uneasy rhythm, like the pulse of a body sick with fever. Once I thought I heard voices raised, sharp and muffled, before Ritter’s command cut them short. Silence fell again, but it was not the silence of rest.

Holmes shifted at my side. I could tell from the steady rhythm of his breath that he did not sleep, though his eyes were closed.

“It will not hold,” he said softly at last, scarcely above a whisper.

“What will not?”

“This place,” he murmured. “They have bound their wounds with silence, but silence is no cure. One harsh word, and the seam splits.”

He fell quiet, and I lay staring into the dark, waiting for the seam to give.

Chapter Text

By the fourth morning the camp moved as if to Ritter’s pulse. He had said nothing at dawn, only stood watching the men stumble to the nets, and yet they went with the look of conscripts. When he did speak—a curt order to shift the fire, a rebuke over wasted rope—it landed like a hand across the face. Even silence was a weight he knew how to use. Once a quarrel broke out by the fish racks; Ritter lifted his head and the words died as if cut by a blade. No one met his eyes after.

Klara walked the same ground differently. She knelt beside the fevered boy, tucking a rag at his brow, coaxed a smile from the girl who had not eaten in two days. Men who muttered at Ritter let their shoulders ease when she passed. Hans, the scarred carpenter, caught her hand as she gave him a cup. For a moment he held it longer than needful, eyes fixed on her face. She withdrew gently, and Holmes’s brow twitched with amusement I did not share.

It was through Klara that we met Herr Müller and his wife, Elise. Once they had been scholars with crates of glassware and notebooks bound in calfskin; now their instruments lay in splinters, their notes blurred into smudges where damp had chewed the ink. Müller spoke of the island with the bitterness of a man betrayed, each word weighted with the memory of things lost. He spat the names of birds as if they were insults, cursed the very lava he had once measured with devotion.

Elise sat beside him, her smile quick whenever someone addressed her, though her hands told another story, fingers worrying the edge of her skirt until threads frayed loose and clung like cobwebs. When she laughed at a mild remark, Müller’s hand closed hard on her wrist. The sound died in her throat, leaving only the mark of his grip. She lowered her gaze, but her shoulders held rigid, as though trained never to flinch.

Kappel saw her too clearly. At the fireside he leaned in, speaking low, his voice a steady drip meant for her alone. Once she startled into laughter—high, nervous, cut short as though she feared the echo might carry too far. Müller’s face went ashen. He set down his bowl with deliberate care, though the tendons in his jaw bulged as if he ground his teeth to powder.

The camp noticed. No one acknowledged it. Men bent lower over their fish, spoons clinking with exaggerated calm. The silence stretched taut, until the flames themselves seemed to crackle too loudly.

The following night Kappel pressed further. He tipped his bowl toward Elise, voice pitched to reach every ear around the circle. “Strange, isn’t it,” he drawled, “to see a woman like you wasting herself on a man who prefers fossils to flesh.”

Elise’s cheeks flamed. She bent her head as though the fire itself had scorched her, lips pressed tight. Müller’s spoon froze halfway to his mouth, then clenched until broth spilled hot across his knuckles. He did not wipe it away.

Ritter chewed in silence, but his jaw worked like a millstone, slow and grinding. Klara’s gaze flicked sharp across the fire, a warning blade that Kappel ignored.

Later, as we walked from the glow of the coals, Holmes bent close. “The husband’s eyes never leave her. Hers stray, whether by choice or by instinct. And Kappel—” He gave the faintest shake of his head. “He is the kind of man who strikes sparks on stone. Tinder, Watson. And that is the match.”

Not long after, an accident unsettled the camp. Hans had gone to split driftwood with one of the dull axes, his strokes more fury than strength. Each blow rang through the clearing, a hard metallic crack that made children flinch. The knot in the wood turned one stroke aside; the blade glanced and tore a long splinter across another man’s arm. Blood welled bright, running in rivulets down to his wrist.

The man cried out, dropping his bundle, and the camp dissolved into noise—men shouting, one accusing Hans of madness, another excusing him, Greta’s child wailing shrill until she clapped him silent. The gulls overhead wheeled lower, their harsh cries carrying like alarm-bells.

I pushed forward at once, reaching for the wounded man. My leg protested the sudden step, the old ache flaring. Yet I pressed nearer, for pain seemed a poor excuse while another man bled. “Let me see.”

But Hans was already there, his hands clumsy as he pressed a rag to the gash. He rounded on me, eyes fierce with shame. “No need for your meddling, Doctor. I said it was nothing.” His voice cracked, but he held the cloth tight, as though to prove himself indispensable. The injured man winced, yet made no protest, unwilling to cross him. I stepped back, though unease gnawed at me.

From the edge of the clearing Kappel laughed. The sound was thin, sharp, carrying over the din. “An accident, yes,” he said, his voice heavy with mockery. “And I wonder—who eats less tonight to make up for it?”

The camp fell still. Faces turned on Hans, eyes narrowed, suspicion kindling. He spat into the dirt but did not lift his gaze.

Then Ritter moved. He crossed the space without hurry, laid one scarred hand on the injured man’s shoulder, and with the other adjusted the makeshift bandage with a calm Hans could not muster. Straightening, he turned that heavy jaw upon the circle. No words came, nor were they needed. The voices sank to silence, the wood lay untouched, and even the gulls wheeled away into the wind.

Holmes lingered near the palisade, his gaze fixed on Kappel where he lounged, smiling crookedly. At last he crossed to him, his voice deceptively mild. “You thrive in idleness. It is a talent—parasites often do.” His hand strayed, almost absently, to the bandage beneath his hair.

Kappel’s smile deepened, sharp and joyless. “And yet parasites endure, Doctor, while the host weakens. Perhaps you will live to see which of us lasts longer.”

Holmes tilted his head, as though examining some specimen on a slide, then turned without another word. As he passed me his hand brushed his temple, where the bandage still hid the gash. The gesture was careless, yet I knew it for what it was—a reminder of how thin our own skin ran.

I felt the throb of my bad leg as I shifted, the ache flaring. Blood, bruises, scars—the camp bore them all. 

Holmes’s voice reached me low, meant for me alone. “A small wound will fester if left untended. The same is true of men, Watson. Remember that.”

The words hung like smoke over the clearing, heavier than the silence Ritter had imposed. I could not help but think of my own pulse in the injured limb, of Holmes’s weary gait, and of how little it might take for all of us to break.

It was later that same day when raised voices cracked the stillness by the trough. Müller loomed over Elise, his fingers clamped hard on her arm, forcing her back against the rough wood. She had spoken lightly to one of the younger fishermen—a lad no older than twenty—who laughed as he filled his bucket. The boy froze at Müller’s approach, laughter dying on his lips, then fled, leaving Elise pinned beneath her husband’s glare.

“You shame me,” Müller hissed in German. His grip bit so deep her skin blanched beneath it.

Elise’s smile wavered, brittle, a mask pulled too tight. “It was nothing,” she whispered, her gaze flicking anxiously toward the others. She tried to draw her arm free, but Müller’s hand tightened, forcing a sharp breath from her lips. Her eyes darted once, desperate, before she lowered them again.

Müller’s free hand rose—whether to strike her or simply to cow her, I could not tell—but the sight drove me forward at once. “Herr Müller,” I cried. My voice carried sharper than I intended, and in the corner of her eye, I knew Elise saw the stiffness of my stance, the hitch in my step as I closed the distance. “Release her. Now.”

He wheeled on me, eyes fever-bright, his lifted hand twitching as though tempted to fall upon me instead. For a moment I thought he would. Elise seized his sleeve, pulling at him in panic. “Please,” she pleaded, breathless. “It is nothing. Let it be nothing.”

The camp had stilled to watch. Men bent low over their work with studied care, but their silence listened keenly. At last Müller flung her arm away with a vicious jerk. She staggered back, rubbing at the flesh already bruising under his grip.

“Doctor,” he said, his voice thick with forced civility, “forgive me. The heat. The work.” The lie weighed heavy in his accent. He did not meet my eye. With rigid shoulders he strode toward the huts and vanished.

Elise remained by the trough, her jug unfilled, her sleeve tugged down to hide the mark. For a moment her eyes met mine—wide, wounded, and searching—as though to measure what I had seen and whether I would dare speak of it. Then she bent to the water, dipping her hands, though they trembled enough to make the surface quiver.

Holmes joined me silently, his gaze still fixed where Müller had gone. “You see?” he murmured. “The fabric tears. And once torn, it seldom mends.”

Elise remained by the trough, her jug unfilled, her sleeve tugged down to hide the mark. For a moment her eyes met mine—wide, wounded, and searching—as though to weigh whether I had truly seen. Then she bent quickly, dipping her hands, though they trembled enough to ripple the water.

I hesitated, then stepped nearer. “Let me look,” I said softly.

She shook her head at once. “It is nothing.” But when her fingers fumbled the jug, nearly spilling it, I caught her wrist gently. The bruise was already swelling, a dark imprint in the pale flesh. From my pocket I drew a strip of clean cloth—one of the last I kept for emergencies—and bound it round her arm. She watched my hands as I worked, lips parted but silent.

When the knot was tied she drew the sleeve back down in haste, as if ashamed of both wound and remedy. Yet for the briefest moment her gaze met mine again, and something flickered there—fear still, but also a spark of warmth, like a candle shielded in cupped hands. Then it was gone.

Holmes joined me silently, his eyes following Müller’s retreat into the huts. “You see?” he murmured. “The fabric tears. And once torn, it seldom mends.”

I looked back at Elise, her shoulders turned to us, her hands steadying now as she filled the jug. She moved quickly, but I could not shake the image of the bruise beneath its covering, nor the brief heat of her gaze.

That evening Kappel drifted toward Elise where she sat at the edge of the firelight. His words were too low for me to catch, but the tilt of his head, the sly half-smile, told enough. Elise gave a small laugh—quick, startled, gone as soon as it broke free. She clapped a hand to her mouth, but the sound had already reached Müller.

His shoulders went rigid. Slowly, like a man forcing calm, he set down his bowl. Elise crossed back to him at once, laying her hand on his arm. He did not shake her off, yet the line of his jaw tightened until the muscle jumped. Their silence rang louder than speech.

Across the circle I murmured, “She means no harm.”

Holmes’s gaze did not leave them. “No,” he said quietly. “But kindness and caution wear the same mask, and I am not sure which we see.”

The fire cracked. Men bent to nets already patched thin. Women stirred pots that hissed but gave little steam. Children coughed in their sleep until Greta pressed cloths to their mouths to hush them. Around it all Kappel prowled—dropping remarks about London clubs, leaning too close at the well, his shadow always brushing Elise’s when Müller looked away.

Faces caught the light as I studied the ring about the fire: drawn, hollowed, eyes darting like prey animals. Suspicion lay as heavy as the smoke. You could not say where the knife would fall, only that it must.

Near midnight a seabird tumbled from the dark, landing among the huts with a thud that startled even the men on watch. Its wings twitched once, then stilled—already dead when it struck. The children clustered round until Klara shooed them back, lifted the limp thing, and cast it into the flames. The smoke that rose was acrid, stinging the throat. I watched it curl skyward with a sense of dread. My leg had stiffened to iron by then, each throb in time with the coughing around the fire. I could not help but wonder whether my body, too, was only waiting its turn to falter. 

By the following evening, the silence had grown unbearable. The stew was thinner than ever, stretched with roots and scraps, and the smoke stung our eyes as we sat in the ring. Spoons scraped, coughs rattled, children whimpered into their mothers’ skirts. No one dared break the hush.

I noticed more that night: Greta hushing her son while her gaze lingered too long on Elise, as though resenting her poise amidst such ruin. Ernst’s steady eyes never left Kappel, measuring him with the suspicion of a man who counts every mouthful. Hans sat stiffly, his gaze flicking between Klara and Ritter with a bitterness he could not disguise. 

Elise herself was restless, shifting, her glances skimming the circle. Once she brushed back her hair and caught a young man’s eye across the fire—one of the fishermen—and he flushed red to the ears before snapping his gaze to the ground. I saw Müller’s shoulders tighten at the sight, though Elise herself seemed hardly aware she had done it.

Then Kappel shifted, letting the fire catch his face. “You see, gentlemen,” he said in English, pitched loud enough for all, “this is what passes for plenty here. Once we might have had fish, even goat. Now we gnaw at weeds and call it survival.”

A murmur ran through the men. Ritter’s gaze cut across the flames like a blade, but Kappel pressed on. “And why? Because our leader—” he dipped his head mockingly toward Ritter—“hoards what little we have, while his wife plays at queen. The rest of you bow and scrape, and still the children starve.”

The words struck like a spark. Hans, the carpenter, shot to his feet, his bowl spilling into the dirt. “Better bow to Ritter than to you!” he shouted. “You bring nothing, you take everything!”

Kappel’s smile curved, sharp as glass. “And yet you all keep me. Why, Hans? Perhaps because your queen finds my company less dull than yours.”

Gasps broke the hush. Elise’s head snapped up, her face gone pale; Müller went rigid beside her, half-rising before freezing, his hands clenched white on his knees. Greta pulled her children closer, eyes wide. Ernst muttered something low and furious under his breath, too soft to catch, but his stare never left Kappel.

“Enough,” Klara said sharply, rising. Her voice carried, firm but weary. “Sit down, all of you. The children are listening.”

For a moment the circle wavered on the brink. Then Hans dropped heavily back to his seat, breathing hard, while Ritter spoke a single low command that settled the camp into silence again.

Kappel only laughed, soft and bitter. He set down his empty bowl, rose with a mocking flourish, and bowed as though the meal had been a play staged for his amusement. “Eat, then,” he said. “Pretend your silence is strength.”

And with that he strode off into the dark beyond the firelight.

The circle held its silence as he vanished into the night. The fire spat, throwing sparks after him like a trail of cinders. Somewhere in the dark a dog began to growl, low and steady, until a sharp word silenced it. Greta crossed herself; Ernst spat into the dust.

Holmes’s eyes followed the place where Kappel had gone. He said nothing, but I felt the weight of his thought all the same.

Chapter Text

The quarrel had not ended so much as thinned into silence. Voices had risen, broken, then faltered into muttering. When the fire died to embers, men turned away from one another, their faces tight with words unsaid. Even in sleep the camp seemed restless, bodies shifting, coughs stifled, and the scrape of a knife carried too clearly on the night air. More than once, I woke to the sound of footsteps pacing outside the hut. Each time I rose to look, the dark held nothing but smoke and wind.

When dawn finally broke, it came muted, the sky smeared grey like ash over the sea. The camp stirred later than usual. Even the coughs of the sick were subdued. No tools clattered, no axes struck. Men lingered in their huts, women moved quietly among the fires, and every sound seemed to carry the wary hush of people unwilling to meet one another’s eyes. It was the silence after a blow, raw and bruised, as if the air itself had been wounded.

Holmes’s movements were restless but uneven. His arm stayed close to his side, stiff with pain, his shoulder jerking with each motion. He paced the clearing like a tethered hound, his eyes darting from the palisade to the sagging nets, from the smoke-blackened pots to the embers that smouldered like a wound refusing to close. His face betrayed nothing, but I noticed the whiteness of his knuckles, the tension in his jaw, and the faint tremor in his left hand when he thought himself unobserved.

For myself, the air within the camp felt thick as a sickroom. Each cough from the huts, each muttered voice, pressed down on me, until my own chest ached. My joints throbbed from the damp, my lungs yearning for a breath of air not steeped in suspicion. I longed for the sea wind, for the clean, unburdened reach of the sky.

When I reached for the empty water bucket, it was with more eagerness than I cared to show. Holmes broke his pacing and came to my side. “I will walk with you,” he said, his voice clipped but carrying more weight than it let on. The stiffness of his movement, the guarded way he shifted his upper body, spoke volumes more than his words.

We slipped through the narrow gate and left the settlement behind. The path wound between thickets and broke at intervals to glimpses of black rock and restless sea. Gulls wheeled high, their cries thin and sharp, and for a time we heard nothing but our own uneven steps on the damp earth.

Holmes’s shoulders loosened as we put distance between ourselves and the palisade, the pressure of constant eyes easing at last. “Curious,” he said after a time, “how quickly one grows cautious. I measure each word as though the camp were a courtroom.”

“You’ve never liked being watched,” I said.

“No man does. But you...” he glanced at me sidelong, a flicker of humour crossing his mouth that vanished as quickly as it came. “You bear it better. You were made for company, Watson. I for solitude.”

“And yet you chose to follow me for a bucket of water,” I said, shifting it to my other hand.

“Even hermits must breathe air.” He gave a quiet hum, then winced as his bandaged brow pulled. “Besides, the Fates are fond of irony.”

We let the silence stretch comfortably as we walked, filled only by the sea hissing against the rocks below. The air was damp and cool on my face, and my thoughts wandered unbidden to Baker Street: fog curling at the windows, the rumble of wheels on the cobbles, Mrs. Hudson’s tread on the stair. For the first time in days, I allowed myself to miss it—and the longing cut sharp.

Holmes must have caught the drift of my expression, for his voice softened. “Home?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “Don’t you think of it?”

“Less than I ought. For me, home is wherever the mind is busy.” He tapped his temple lightly, though his hand lingered there as if steadying himself. “And here, the material is plentiful.”

“You never change,” I murmured, though my tone carried no censure.

“On the contrary.” His gaze flicked toward me, the bandage stark at his brow, his eyes hollowed by fatigue. “I fear I change too much. You are the one who remains steady.”

We rounded a bend in the path, the sea opening wide below us in a slate-grey sweep. The gulls had fallen silent. Holmes slowed, his head lifting, every sense drawn taut.

“Do you hear it?” he murmured.

I paused beside him, listening. Only the tide, restless and ceaseless. “Nothing but the sea.”

“Not sound,” he said. “Absence.”

We went on, the hush of the cliffs pressing close, the sea’s voice pounding louder against the black rock. Holmes walked briskly, but I saw the faint catch in his stride, the guarded way his shoulder moved. Until then I had thought all his weakness lay in the blow to his head. He had kept the arm close, hidden beneath his coat, and in the dim light of the huts, with my own strength failing day by day, I had not marked it for what it was. The physician in me winced at the neglect, ashamed that I had tended others while overlooking the man beside me.

“You should rest,” I said. “The blow you took—”

“Merely a bruise.”

“A bruise that nearly toppled you. You’ll do us no service if you drive yourself into the ground.”

He gave a low sound, half laugh, half growl. “Ever the physician. You forget, Watson: stubbornness is my most enduring organ.”

“And the most exasperating,” I countered, shifting the bucket in my hand. “Better I bind you here on the path than see you felled by pride.”

He glanced sidelong, a flicker of warmth breaking briefly through the set of his features. “You do not give up easily.”

“I’ve had practice,” I said dryly.

We fell into silence then, but it was not the camp’s silence, thick with suspicion and breathless rancour. This was different: quieter, almost human, the sea filling the spaces words might have occupied.

Holmes slowed. His gaze fixed on the rocks below, and the line of his body sharpened, all nerves drawn taut.

“Watson,” he said quietly.

I followed his eyes. At first I saw only the shifting of seaweed, the gleam of spray on stone. Then the line altered at an angle where no rock should angle, a pale glint where no weed grew. We stood together as the tide crept in and out, until the shape resolved itself into something unmistakable.

At the cliff’s base, where black rock met the tide, lay a figure too still to be driftwood. The sea lifted the edge of a coat, then let it fall again. Pale hair clung wet to the skull, plastered flat by brine.

My breath caught. The bucket slipped from my hand and struck the earth with a dull thud. Holmes said nothing. His eyes narrowed, his face unreadable, but I knew well enough the verdict gathering in his mind. The bucket rolled and came to rest against a stone. I scarcely noticed. My gaze was fixed on the figure below, the pale hair stark against the rocks.

“Good God,” I whispered. “Is it...”

“Kappel.” The name fell from Holmes’s lips like a gavel’s blow.

A tremor went through me, half shock, half the chill that rose from the sea itself. “We should fetch the others—”

“Not yet.” His hand found my sleeve, firm but light. “A crowd will trample what the tide has not already scoured. We must see first. Alone.”

I tore my eyes from the corpse to his face. The bandage at his temple had slipped, darkened at the edge. “You should not climb on those rocks.”

“Better bruised than blind, Watson. If this is what it appears, the ground itself is testimony. We cannot risk it erased.”

I wanted to protest, but the steel in his voice allowed no argument. He had shifted already from companion to detective, the change as palpable as a chill wind cutting the cliffside.

The path downward was little more than a goat track, slick with spray. Stones shifted treacherously underfoot. Holmes went first, his long frame balanced with the care of a man measuring every step. The bandage slipped again beneath his hairline, that familiar reminder of the blow to his temple, but now I noticed more. Each time his weight shifted, his left arm hung guarded at his side, stiff as though bound by pain. When he caught at an outcrop and lingered too long, I saw the strain cross his face before he mastered it.

This was no relic of the head wound. He had hidden it from me—whether from pride, or fear of slowing me, I could not tell. The physician in me felt the urge to stop him then and there, to demand he rest; the man beside him felt only the sharper ache of being shut out.

“You should let me lead,” I called softly, unsettled now by more than the path. “If you fall—”

He glanced back, mouth tight. “If I fall, Watson, I would sooner have you above me than beneath.”

The climb jarred my joints at once. Each crouch and rise drove fire through my knees, and the absence of my cane was keenly felt. Twice I stumbled, scraping skin on the wet stone until my nails split, and each time Holmes halted, waiting in silence, his eyes sharp with a concern he would not voice. His own movements were no less laboured, the stiffness of his shoulder forcing a hitch into every reach, but he pressed on as if duty itself kept him upright.

We moved inch by inch until the rock flattened and the sea opened before us. The body lay close now, no more than twenty paces off, tangled in a fringe of seaweed. The tide surged in and out, rocking it faintly, as though the island itself had not yet decided whether to keep or cast him away.

Holmes drew a slow breath, steadying himself. “Come,” he said, and we went on together, two battered men picking their way toward the dead.

We crossed the last stretch of slick stone, the sea tugging at our boots, salt and kelp sharp in the throat.

Kappel lay crumpled as though the tide had thrown him aside like wreckage. His coat was sodden, the fabric clinging to the outlines of his frame; his boots were damp but not caked with sand. One arm sprawled wide, palm upturned, fingers curled half-shut as though still reaching for a grip.

His head rested at an unnatural angle against the stone. Pale hair, darkened by water, clung to his brow. Blood had dried at his temple, a single line cutting too cleanly through the salt and spray. His eyes were half open, the grey of them filmed over, fixed blankly toward the sea.

There was no peace in the face. Even in death it mocked, the mouth parted in the crooked semblance of the smile he had worn at the fire. That trace of derision chilled me more than any wound.

Holmes stood beside me, silent. He looked down long and steadily, memorising every detail before the tide could wipe it clean.

I swallowed against the tightness in my throat. “He’s gone,” I said, though the words were thin, unnecessary.

Holmes’s reply came quiet, deliberate. “Yes. But not as they will think.”

For a moment I could not move. The sea surged and drew back, washing foam over his boots, tugging faintly at his coat, yet he did not stir. Death has many faces, but here it wore the one I had known too often in the field: not the slow loosening of illness, but the abrupt stillness of a life cut short.

The gulls had returned, wheeling above, their cries thin and harsh. One swooped low, and I startled at it, absurdly protective of the corpse at my feet. The camp’s quarrels, its hunger and suspicion, seemed to echo now in Kappel’s frozen expression, as though he had borne their bitterness with him into the tide.

I drew breath, steadying myself. “So this is how it ends for him,” I murmured. “Alone, among the rocks.”

He lowered himself stiffly, favouring one side, the effort tight across his face before he smoothed it away. His hand hovered above the body, not touching, eyes narrowing.

“Yes,” he said at last. “Alone. But not unaccompanied.”

The sea tugged at our boots, the air raw with salt. My breath came uneven, as if the sight of him had stripped the strength from my chest.

Holmes crouched lower, the bandage at his temple slipping, his fingers pressed to his knee for balance as he studied the corpse. The tide rocked the body again, impatient to claim it. I wanted to drag Kappel higher onto the stone, to save him that indignity, but something in Holmes’s stillness forbade it.

At length he said, very low, “Look closely, Watson.”

I forced my eyes to follow his. The blood at Kappel’s temple was no ordinary smear. It traced a clean, narrow line. No jagged stone had cut it. The skin about it was unmarked, no tearing, no bruise of a fall.

“Too neat,” Holmes murmured. He touched the sodden coat. “And note. The boots are wet, but free of sand. He did not climb here himself. He was carried, set down where the tide might pass for chance.”

I swallowed hard, the chill deepening. “Then it was no accident.”

Holmes’s eyes lifted to mine, grey and sharp despite his pallor. “No, Watson. It was murder, and clumsily dressed as fate.”

The word hung between us, stark as the cliffs. Murder.

I drew in the sea air, sharp and bitter, and looked again at the crooked smile fixed on Kappel’s lips. The man had provoked all who crossed him, needling their wounds until they bled. And now he had paid the price. Part of me felt the bleak inevitability of it, yet the sight of him sprawled among weed and stone stirred no triumph, only dread.

“Who?” I asked at last. My voice rasped low, hoarse. “All of them had cause.”

“Cause, yes.” Holmes’s hand hovered above the wound again, then withdrew. “But opportunity narrows the field. And method narrows it further still.” His gaze swept the cliff path above us, pausing on the smear of seaweed where something heavy had been dragged. “This was no frenzied blow, Watson. It was deliberate. A hand accustomed to precision.”

Above us, gulls wheeled and screamed, their cries jagged against the sky. I pressed my palm to the damp rock, steadying myself as weariness surged through me. “Then the camp itself is a trap. We are penned in with a killer.”

Holmes straightened, his jaw tight. “Yes. And that is why we must measure our words as carefully as our steps. Speak too soon, and we shall be the next to lie among the rocks.”

The sea hissed at our feet, as though to underscore the warning. For a moment we did not move, the tide breathing in and out around the corpse between us. Then came the sharp crack of a branch behind.

Holmes’s head turned at once, eyes narrowing. Through the scrub at the bend of the path a figure emerged—Ernst, the sailor, shoulders hunched, gaze quick and sharp. He stopped short when he saw the body. His mouth opened, then closed again, his eyes flicking from Kappel’s face to ours with something like calculation.

Another followed: Greta, one child clinging to her hand, the other bound against her hip. At the sight of the corpse she pulled both children close and made the sign of the cross, whispering words I could not catch. When she looked up, her eyes were wide, suspicious.

Voices carried down then from the path above, more feet on stone. Soon they appeared: Hans with fists clenched, Müller and Elise close behind, Klara striding before them with purpose. Ritter came last, silent, his scar livid in the morning light.

One by one they descended, some creeping with care, others clattering heedless, until the rocks were crowded with their shadows. Murmurs rose at once, questions overlapping in harsh German, curses spat under the breath. A child began to cry, hushed swiftly by its mother.

Klara knelt first, skirts soaking in the brine. She set her fingers first to Kappel’s throat, then his temple, her touch steady though her face had paled. She lifted her eyes to Ritter. “He is gone,” she said simply.

The words loosed the others. Voices surged—some relieved, others fearful. I caught fragments: gut so… Gott straft… wer hat es getan. Each phrase a shard, flung sharp into the morning air.

Holmes stepped back a pace, letting the storm of voices swell unchecked. His eyes flicked from face to face, weighing each reaction with the same cold precision he had given the corpse. I felt the crowd press in, suspicion shifting like the tide itself. Already it seemed less a question of what had happened than of who among us would pay for it. The murmurs thickened, broke into words flung sharp across the rocks.

“Gut so!” Ernst spat, arms folded. “Better him than any of us.”

Greta’s voice cracked back, fierce despite the child clutching at her skirts. “Do not speak so before the little ones! He was a man still—and someone struck him down.”

Hans shouldered forward, fists raw. “Aye, struck. Not the sea’s doing. Look at his head. That was no fall.” His eyes cut toward Müller, lingering too long. “You quarreled with him, did you not? At the fire.”

Müller stiffened. Elise caught his arm, whispering his name, but he shook her off. “You think I would risk all our necks for his taunts?” His voice trembled—anger, but edged with fear.

“He taunted your wife,” Hans shot back. “We all saw it.”

The words rippled through the group. Elise flushed, her mouth opening to answer, but Klara rose sharply, skirts wet against the stone.

“Enough!” Her voice lashed across them like a whip. “You shame yourselves. The children hear you.”

But Ritter had already stepped closer to the corpse. His gaze swept the rocks, then the ring of faces. “Hans is right about one thing. This was no fall.” He jabbed a scarred finger at Kappel’s temple. “A hand struck him down. And that hand is here among us.”

The silence that followed was worse than the shouting. Eyes turned, not to the body, but to each other—measuring, accusing.

Holmes stood at my side, still as stone, the weight of his gaze taut as a drawn wire. He did not speak—not yet.

The surf hissed against the rocks, filling the pause. The air itself seemed to tighten, every face turned from Müller to Hans, from Ritter to Elise, then back again to the pale shape sprawled in the weeds.

Holmes’s arm brushed mine, a light touch—warning, or steadying, I could not tell. His lips were pressed thin, his eyes hooded. I knew the signs: his mind was working, notes already taken, conclusions forming. Yet he held his tongue.

For once, I did not urge him. What right had we, strangers bound into this place by misfortune, to arbitrate its secrets? We were not in Baker Street, with the law at our backs. Here, we were tolerated only for my skill with the sick and his with silence. To step between them now was to invite their wrath.

Klara knelt once more beside the corpse, her voice steady but strained. “He is dead. Quarrels will not change it. We must take him back, bury him, and pray that is the end of it.”

Ritter grunted, then gave a curt nod. At his gesture, Ernst and Hans stooped to lift the body. Their rough hands made my stomach twist, but I bit my tongue. They hauled Kappel up the path, and the camp followed in a slow, muttering procession. Holmes and I lingered at the rear.

“Watson,” he said softly, so low the surf nearly swallowed it, “you are right to hold your tongue. We walk a knife’s edge. Hunger, grief—we cannot know how it will break. If I speak too soon, the next body among the rocks may be mine.”

I shivered, though the sun had begun to pierce the clouds.

We followed in silence, the sea at our backs, the muttering camp ahead. Kappel swung awkwardly between them, his arms loose, his pale hair plastered with brine. Each step jarred him like a broken puppet, and no one spoke of gentleness.

Behind, gulls shrieked, circling the stones where he had lain. Ahead, the camp waited, smoke drifting low, hollow-eyed figures gathering as word spread. Snatches of prayer and fear carried down the path.

Holmes walked beside me, his head bent, the bandage slipping at his temple. Once, as Ernst stumbled and the corpse lurched, Holmes’s hand twitched with the instinct to steady, to intervene. But he let it fall again.

I kept my eyes forward. The path was narrow, hemmed by thorn and stone, and I felt it keenly: the sense of being herded back into the enclosure where hunger and suspicion ruled. When at last the palisade loomed, its timbers black against the sky, I felt no relief.

The burial was swift. There was no priest, no rite but the scraping of spades and the mutter of a few ragged prayers. The ground was stony, and each thrust of the shovel rang harsh against it. They laid him shallow, the sea-wind scattering sand across his face before it was covered. No one lingered long. Hunger and fear make poor mourners.

That night the camp lay hushed again, but not with sleep. Shadows moved against the firelight, voices low and sharp, cut short whenever footsteps drew near. Even the sick coughed into their blankets as though afraid to be heard.

Holmes lay with his arm bandaged tight, his face turned toward the wall of the hut. I could not tell if he slept. For myself, I did not. The sound of the tide carried faintly through the palisade, a rhythm I could not shut out. Each surge seemed to me the breath of the island itself, patient, waiting.

Chapter Text

Holmes bore himself with his usual composure as we followed the others toward the clearing, but I had seen too much to be fooled any longer. His arm hung stiff at his side, each step setting a deeper line in his face. The camp trailed ahead of us, voices hushed, spades ringing dully against the earth. I caught his sleeve and stopped him short of the gathering.

“Holmes,” I said. “No further until I see to that.”

His look could have cut glass, but I held it. At last he gave the faintest exhale through his nose and lowered himself onto a driftwood log.

I removed his coat and pulled his shirt sleeve away, my fingers careful, though his jaw tightened at every brush. The flesh beneath was livid, the bruising spreading from shoulder to bicep in sickly purples and yellows. The heat of it struck me at once, and the swelling was so fierce that for a dreadful moment I feared the joint was half out of socket from our fall. But no, the bone held; it was pain and strain that robbed him, not dislocation.

“You should have told me.”

His mouth curved faintly, though sweat had gathered at his temple. “And have you fuss like this before Ritter and his crew? They would scent weakness faster than blood in water.”

“You’ll do more harm if you keep forcing it,” I said. The words came harsher than I intended. I pressed gently along the shoulder; he winced despite his best effort not to. “It must be rested, kept still.”

His eyes narrowed, a flicker of defiance in the grey. “You would have me trussed like an invalid? No. I will not give them that satisfaction.”

Behind us, the gulls shrieked over the surf, the sound as raw as the muscle beneath my hands. I steadied my voice. “Then we compromise.”

From my pack I pulled a strip of cloth, looped it across his neck, and fashioned a sling low and discreet. With his coat drawn close, it would appear no more than a fold of fabric. I tugged the knot tight, the coarse cloth rasping against my fingers, and felt the weight of his arm settle into it.

“Enough to ease the strain. Nothing more.”

He exhaled again, grudging, but softer this time. “Subtle. I will allow it.”

I bound the arm firm, my hand lingering at his wrist longer than necessity. The skin was uncomfortably warm beneath my touch, the pulse strong but uneven. He did not draw away.

“They will see only this,” I murmured. “That I keep you whole, as you keep me.”

For the briefest instant his hand covered mine, the pressure steady, warm. Then he drew back, mask restored, and rose to his feet. Together we went on toward the grave, the hush of the camp settling over us like a shroud.

They buried Kappel at the edge of the clearing where the earth thinned to sand, a place already half-claimed by the sea. The grave was shallow, hacked with dull spades and bare hands, more a wound in the soil than a resting place. No priest stood among us, no rites were spoken; even grief here was rationed, clipped short.

When the body was lowered in, the hush that followed weighed heavier than any prayer. The children shrank against their mothers. Some men fixed their eyes on the dirt as if daring it to conceal more than it could. Others crossed themselves quick and furtive, the gesture less pious than fearful, as though even faith might mark them out.

Holmes stood apart. His gaze was not on the grave but on the faces around it, weighing each flicker and twitch. The fresh bandage at his temple caught the light; I prayed my own work would hold, though I knew the pain it cost him.

When it was done, Ritter stamped the earth flat with his boot and turned away without a word. One by one the rest dispersed, until only Elise lingered beside the grave, her hand pressed lightly to the mound to steady herself.

When Holmes was drawn aside by Hans to inspect the palisade, she came to me. Her face was pale, the lines of weariness too deep for a woman so young. She glanced back once to be sure we were unobserved, then spoke low, her voice thinned by strain.

“You are a doctor. You see what we endure.”

I inclined my head. “I do.”

Her eyes shone, though whether with anger or unshed tears I could not tell. “It was not always like this. We thought—we came to build, to study, to live. But the sea takes, the soil gives nothing back, and hunger makes men into beasts. Ritter holds them through fear, and fear only. And my husband—” She stopped, biting the words back, her hand trembling at the edge of her shawl.

“You need not say,” I told her quietly. “I have seen enough.”

Her gaze lifted to mine, searching, almost desperate. “But I must. He watches me always. He twists my smiles, my kindness, into lies. And perhaps they are lies. Perhaps I smile only to keep from screaming. You understand? I needed to speak it aloud.”

Her hand pressed to mine, her voice trembling with the strain of words bitten back. I held it, but only for a moment, and even then my fingers twitched as though eager to flee. The urge shamed me at once, for she had given me nothing but candor, and I answered with recoil. Yet I could not help it. Behind her, the camp moved on, spades clattering, voices carrying low. Still I felt as though the whole clearing leaned toward us, listening. When at last she slipped away, relief and guilt mingled sharp in my chest.

In that moment, I remembered the bruises I had bound upon her arm, the whispered gratitude she had pressed on me in the shadow of the hut. I laid my hand gently over hers. “You have spoken. And it will go no further.”

She pressed my hand once, fiercely, then slipped away before the others could notice.

When Holmes returned, his brow furrowed, he asked me nothing, though I knew he read the change in my face. His hand brushed mine briefly as he passed, steadying—or reminding—before he said, “They will starve before another month is out. And then, Watson, the quarrels of last night will seem like child’s play.”

Over the next days Elise contrived reasons to cross my path. Once, as I returned from the cask with a bucket that weighed heavy in my sore arm, she appeared at my side with a bundle of cloths. “For the sick,” she said, steady-voiced, though her fingers lingered against mine as she passed them over. The touch was slight, but in that moment, sweat stinging my eyes, my shoulder aching, it seemed to burn longer than it should.

Another time, as I bent to check Greta’s boy, Elise knelt close, her hand light upon my shoulder. “He breathes easier,” she whispered. Her breath stirred the hair at my temple.

Before I could reply, Müller’s shadow fell across us. He muttered a curse in German, the sound guttural, and seized Elise by the wrist. His grip was not violent, but it was tight enough that she winced. “Come,” he said, low. She rose at once, eyes downcast, and let him draw her away. The boy stirred beneath my hand, and I forced my attention back to him, though my pulse had quickened.

At night, when the circle about the fire thinned, she sought me out again. The flames picked the hollows in her face, making her eyes too bright. “You remind me,” she said, gaze on the fire, “of a man I knew in Hamburg—a soldier, quiet, kind. He, too, seemed built to bear more than his share.” She gave a low laugh, brittle as the embers. “It is not fair, is it, that such men carry everyone else’s weight?”

I answered carefully, aware of the ears that listened even when eyes pretended not to. “There is nothing fair about this island.”

But already I had noticed the looks: Müller’s glare when I rose from tending his wife, Ritter’s silence drawn longer than speech, even Klara’s brief frown as she passed. Elise thought her confessions private, but nothing in such close quarters remained unseen.

I made a point of keeping my hands occupied: hauling water, binding cracked palms, measuring fevered breaths with studied care. I bent lower over my work than was needed, the sting of salt and ash in my eyes an excuse not to meet hers. And still her shadow found me. A cloth pressed into my palm, a word breathed too near—no task was barrier enough.

Holmes, of course, missed nothing. When Elise pressed a small portion of her stew into my bowl one evening, he leaned close. His breath stirred the air by my ear, his voice so quiet it seemed carried by the crackle of the fire. “Take care, Watson. She draws you into her orbit. Whether she seeks comfort or escape, the eyes upon her will not forgive it.”

“I have given her nothing but civility,” I murmured back, though even as I said it I felt the weight of Elise’s gaze upon me.

“On an island this small,” Holmes replied, “civility is tinder. One spark, and the whole place burns.”

I lowered my voice. “You think me so easily swayed?”

Holmes’s glance was sharp in the firelight. “Not swayed. Marked. That is enough.”

I made to protest, but the words stuck. He had seen what I would not admit even to myself: that Elise’s eyes lingered, that her confidences came too easily. That I, blind fool that I was, had never thought such regard might fall on me at all.

Holmes began his inquiries not with the sharp edge I had so often seen in Baker Street, but with something nearer to idle talk—a man passing time rather than prying. It sat uneasily on him. He moved through the camp slowly, folding his questions into their labors as if to avoid breaking their rhythm. Even so, I caught the flicker in his eyes: he was listening as keenly as ever, only here the ground beneath him was less certain.

With Hans he crouched beside the half-mended palisade, his bandaged arm held stiff at his side. He ran a finger along the warped timber. “You keep it sound with little enough to work from,” he said lightly. Hans muttered of storms, rot, tools blunted beyond use. Only after several minutes did Holmes add, almost idly, “And Kappel, did he work beside you?”

Hans’s mouth thinned. “Never. He laughed at the effort. Said a wall was no better than a child’s game.” His eyes flicked to me, then away. “Perhaps he was right. The sea came through all the same.” The bitterness in his tone was sharper than the words themselves, and Holmes did not press.

Later, with Ernst at the nets, Holmes let his voice carry like idle remark. “These knots are sailor’s work. Long practiced.”

Ernst gave a grunt, neither agreement nor denial. His hands moved with a jerking impatience, as though each knot chafed.

“You knew Kappel best,” Holmes went on, his tone mild, too mild. “He spoke often enough of Hamburg. Did he share your salt?”

Ernst spat into the sand. “Kappel shared nothing. Not food, not strength, not hope. The sea is well rid of him.” Then his eyes snapped up, sharp as hooks. “But it was not the sea, was it?”

Holmes’s gaze rested on him a beat too long. His lips parted, then closed again. When at last he spoke, it was soft, more admission than declaration. “No. It was not.”

Wherever Holmes went, he kept me close—carrying water, binding splinters, tending wounds. To the camp it may have looked natural; to me it was plain enough. He meant me never to be apart from him, nor left alone. His caution was a shield, but I felt the weight of it pressing between us.

Even so, Elise’s presence lingered. A hand brushing mine as she passed me a strip of cloth, her gaze across the fire—small things, but in a place so starved, every gesture grew fat with meaning. I offered nothing in return, but silence itself could be twisted into intimacy.

Holmes saw it all. Once, when she had gone, he leaned close, his shoulder brushing mine. His voice was a thread woven through the crackle of the fire. “I keep you in sight for a reason. Their hunger gnaws at food, yes, but also at trust. If you are seen as hers, even in kindness, it may be enough to turn them.”

I thought to protest, but the tautness in his jaw stilled me.

At the woodpile, Ritter split driftwood with the economy of a man who had done it all his life. Each swing was clean, the axe biting deep, the wood cracking in two with a sound that echoed across the camp. Holmes approached with the air of a bystander rather than an inquirer, but the set of his shoulders betrayed strain. He bent to pick up a split log, turning it in his hands as though studying its grain.

“Hard work, even with sharp tools,” he said lightly. “Harder still when the blade is blunted.”

Ritter glanced at him, near to a glare, then swung again, the axehead sinking close enough that chips flew at our feet. “We make do.”

Holmes’s tone stayed smooth, though I caught the edge beneath. “I wonder if Kappel made do as well. He struck me as… less given to labor.”

The axe paused mid-swing, hanging an instant in the air before finishing its cut. Ritter said nothing.

Holmes laid the log neatly on the pile, as if balancing the silence itself. “He must have drawn your eye often enough. Men like him usually do.”

Ritter straightened slowly, his scar catching the light as he turned at last. “Kappel drew everyone’s eye. Not always wisely.” His voice was flat, but his hand clenched too tight on the axe haft.

That was all. Holmes inclined his head, retreating as though he had pressed too far. His arm brushed mine briefly as we walked away, his face unreadable, but I felt the faint tremor when his hand dropped again to his side.

That evening a quarrel broke out near the cookfire. A man cursed over his portion—too thin, too little—and another struck the bowl from his hands. The stew hissed into the sand, sharp with the smell of herbs that could no longer mask the thinness of the broth. For a moment I thought knives would follow. The men squared, their hunger plain in the hollows of their cheeks, their fists white on the handles of their spoons.

Klara’s voice cut through, sharp and steady, and the men drew back. But the air after was worse than the quarrel itself: a silence strung so tight it seemed ready to snap.

Holmes leaned close to me, his breath ragged from the day’s exertion. “You see it, Watson. Hunger gnaws not only at the belly. It leaves nothing untouched.”

By the week’s end the camp felt thinner in every sense. The stew grew weaker, more water than grain; the nets came up nearly empty, and the roots pulled from the soil were shriveled, hardly worth the labor it cost. Ritter doled out the stew with his usual grim economy. As Holmes reached for his portion, the fold of fabric at his chest shifted, showing the sling’s line for a moment. Ritter’s gaze flicked to it and then away as if it did not matter. But the silence after stretched too long, and I felt the heat crawl up the back of my neck.

Mutters rose about the supply ship that should have come by midsummer—salt, flour, perhaps even tools. But the storm had scattered everything, even certainty. Some whispered the ship was wrecked, others that it had passed them by on purpose. Either way, the waiting gnawed at them no less than hunger.

In such privation, kindness drew attention like blood in water.

Later, Elise pressed a bruised apple into my hand, her fingers warm against my palm. I tried to return it once, twice, but she shook her head with that same searching look. My throat tightened. At last I raised it to my lips, because refusal would be, or worse, an insult. The fruit was mealy, bitter, yet I chewed. Across the clearing, Müller watched, his face carved hard as stone.

Holmes saw it too. That evening by the fire, when Elise seated herself nearer than before, he shifted subtly, drawing me between them. His expression gave nothing away, but under the cover of the bowl he passed, his hand brushed mine—steady, insistent. A warning.

Later, in our lean-to, the canvas stirring faintly with sea-wind, I set out the little store of bandages and water we had left. Holmes sat cross-legged, his face composed, but when I pressed gently at his temple the bandage came away spotted fresh again. The cut was knitting slowly, but the skin beneath stayed tender, angry, a mark that refused to fade. His shoulder troubled me more. The bruising was deep, the joint stiff under my fingers; each movement drew a breath through his teeth, though he stifled it at once.

He bore my fussing in silence, his eyes half-shut, until at last he said, “You forget yourself, Watson. You are no less ragged than I.” His gaze flicked over the cuts and scrapes that lined my hands, the skin rubbed raw by rope and stone. “Every time you stumble through that camp, you come back more worn. Your body thins before my eyes.”

I tried to shrug him off, but the truth of it stung. The joints in my knees ached constantly now; the bruises on my shins never quite healed before new ones formed. He looked at my hands, then at the small case where the laudanum rested. “Do not waste it on me,” he murmured. “You will have need of it yourself before long.”

His hand closed briefly over my wrist, steady despite his own tremor. His voice was low. “We are both fraying. I cannot have you unravelling faster than I.”

For a moment we sat in that hush, his hand warm against mine, before he released me. Then, after a pause, he added quietly, “Watson, I trust your heart more than any man’s. But you must see: she marks you. Each time she does, another pair of eyes turns your way. If suspicion grows scarce in this place, they will feed it with you.”

“I cannot stop her from speaking to me,” I answered, weary.

“No. But you must be wary what you answer back. It is not your fault, Watson. But it is dangerous all the same.”

I promised him I would. Yet even as I said it, I felt again the weight of the apple in my palm, its bruised flesh soft beneath my fingers, and the way Elise had looked at me—not as a doctor, nor as a stranger, but as if I alone were listening.

Holmes pressed further the next day, though not in the manner of London—no summons to chambers, no blunt demands. He moved with quiet persistence instead, questions threaded into the rhythm of labor until men shifted uneasily beneath his gaze.

By the water cask he lingered with Müller, remarking idly on the weight of the buckets, the burden of drawing enough for all. “A man could quarrel over less,” he said, as though to himself.

Müller bristled. “You think I quarrel too easily?”

Holmes’s smile was slight, unreadable. “I think Kappel made a profession of finding quarrels. And I think it wore on you more than most.”

Müller’s jaw tightened. A few paces off, Hans worked at a length of driftwood, his hands shaking so badly the plane slipped against the grain. Elise, who had been watching, gave a soft word in German and drew her husband back toward her. Holmes’s eyes followed them as they went, narrowing in thought.

He said nothing then, only kept me close as the day wore on, as though his silence itself were another line of inquiry.

That evening a quarrel broke out near the cookfire. A man cursed over his portion—too thin, too little—and another struck the bowl from his hands. The stew hissed into the sand, and for a moment I thought knives would follow. Klara’s voice cut through, sharp and steady, and the men drew back, but the air after was worse than the quarrel itself: a silence strung so tight it seemed ready to snap.

Holmes leaned close to me. “You see it, Watson. Hunger gnaws not only at the belly. It leaves nothing untouched.”

The camp settled into uneasy quiet. The fire burned low, its smoke threading through the ribs of the longboat like incense from some forgotten shrine. Men lay restless on the ground, turning often; children whimpered in their sleep. The sea’s breath carried through the palisade, steady, indifferent.

Holmes and I lay side by side in the lean-to, the thin canvas above us stirring faintly with the wind. He did not speak for a long time. I thought him asleep until he shifted, the faint rustle of his bandage in the dark.

“They lie, Watson,” he said at last. His voice was quiet, but sharp-edged. “Or if not lies, half-truths—each man guarding his share of guilt, or fear, or hunger. In London, a lie is a brick in a wall. Here it is tinder, waiting for spark. They bury their questions with their dead, and call it survival.”

I turned to him in the dark. “We are not of them, Holmes. We cannot live as they do.”

“No.” His hand tightened briefly on my wrist, a touch both warning and reassurance. “And they will not let us forget it.”

The silence stretched. The fire hissed, the sea whispered, and beyond the canvas I thought I heard a child cough. Holmes’s grip lingered, warm against my pulse, until at last I closed my own hand over his. We were watched, measured, doubted by all around us—yet in that narrow space between our two bodies, I felt the one certainty left to me: that we must cling to each other, because each other was all we had.

Sleep did not come easily.

Chapter Text

The next day broke harsher than most. The stew pot was empty before the last bowl was filled, Ritter’s hand clamping down on the ladle when Greta’s boy still cried for more. His silence was final, and no one dared break it. The hush that followed was louder than any quarrel.

Holmes moved among them with his quiet observation, but there was less to see—no stores left to guard, only emptiness counted and recounted. Ernst sat with his nets slack across his knees, his gaze fixed on nothing. Hans split driftwood into pieces too small even for kindling, the rhythm of his blows ragged, the splinters flying like wasted effort. The women huddled closer to the fires, eyes darting toward the palisade, as though a ship might appear if they stared long enough.

I tended where I could, though there was little left to give. I pressed damp cloth to cracked lips, steadied trembling hands as they lifted the basin. Such trifles seemed pitiful against the hollowed cheeks about me. Yet each murmur of thanks clung to me like a reproach, as though I had conjured more than scraps and silence.

Through it all Elise’s gaze did not leave me. She lingered near, too near: the basin in my hands before I asked, her fingers brushing mine as though by accident, again and again. Müller’s jaw knotted each time. Even Klara’s glance held a shadow I could not mistake.

Holmes saw it too. He set me at his shoulder whenever he could, the gesture protective but not possessive, his gaze as often on me as on the camp.

Later that afternoon, as he stooped to lift a length of driftwood, I saw his face pinch with pain. His hand pressed briefly to his side before he forced himself upright. I stepped toward him at once, but Elise was quicker. She appeared at my elbow with a basin, her expression mild, yet her eyes too watchful.

I took the water from her hands all the same and dampened a cloth. Holmes did not protest as I dabbed it across his brow, though I felt the faint tremor in his arm when he braced it against my shoulder. His composure held, but I knew too well how much it cost him.

When I looked up, Elise’s gaze lingered longer than courtesy allowed. Across the clearing Müller watched also, his jaw set hard, the handle of his spoon gripped white in his fist. The basin in my hand seemed suddenly heavier, as though it bore not water but accusation.

By evening the air itself seemed brittle, the silence of hunger stretched taut as wire. Even the scrape of spoons against the bowls seemed too loud, too brittle. Into that silence Elise moved at last, crossing the clearing as though she had long resolved what she meant to do.

The fire burned low, its smoke curling through the ribs of the longboat. Holmes sat beside me, gaze fixed on the shifting faces across the circle, where every movement felt magnified by want.

Then Elise rose. She set her empty bowl aside, smoothed her skirt, and crossed the clearing with deliberate steps, her gaze fixed on me from the first.

I felt Holmes stiffen at my side. He glanced at her, then at me, a narrow flash of warning in his eyes. But Elise stopped before us and inclined her head toward me alone.

“Doctor,” she said softly. “A word, if you please.”

Holmes’s lips parted, as though to interject, but she shook her head once. “Not you. Him.”

Her tone was steady, her gaze unyielding. It was not a request but a decision already made. Around the fire I sensed eyes lifting, whispers quickening. The scrape of a spoon halted mid-bowl; a child hushed by her mother’s hand. Even Müller, silent until now, shifted, his mouth a hard line.

I looked to Holmes. His face was calm, but his hand brushed mine in the shadows between us—not to forbid me, but to remind me. Be careful.

“I will not be long,” I told him quietly, and rose with some difficulty.

Elise turned without another word, leading me away from the firelight into the darker edge of the clearing. The murmur of the camp dulled behind us, and for the first time that day, the night itself seemed to lean close, listening.

We had gone only a few paces before I glanced back. The fire still burned low in the center of the clearing, its light casting every face into stark relief. They were not eating now. They were watching. Greta, clutching her children tight; Hans with his hands still on the wood he had been splitting; Ernst leaning forward over his knees. Even Müller’s profile was turned toward us, sharp and motionless in the glow.

I felt the scrutiny like a hand at my back. To leave the circle in her company was to mark myself in a way I had not chosen.

Elise did not falter. She walked on, skirts brushing the trampled earth, until the trees swallowed us and the fire was no more than a dull glow between the branches, its occupants hidden from our view and ourselves hidden from theirs. Only then did she turn, her breath quickened not with fear but with urgency, as though she had waited too long already.

For a moment she said nothing. She stood with her back half-turned, gazing into the dark where the forest met the sea. Her breath misted faintly in the cool air.

“It was not meant to be this way,” she said at last, the words pulled from her like a wound being bared. “When we came, we thought we would build something—a community, a study of the island, a future. My husband spoke of it like an adventure. But now?” She pressed a hand to her mouth, her voice breaking against the silence. “Now it is hunger and sickness. Every day one step closer to the grave. There is no future. Only this.”

Her hands twisted in her skirts. She did not look at me when she added, almost fiercely, “Kappel is dead, and still Ritter holds us like dogs at heel. Even Klara cannot soften him. They follow because they are too weak to resist—and I—” She broke off again, her throat tight. “I am bound to a man who trusts no one, not even me.”

Her voice was low, but her eyes when they found mine were bright, searching, almost defiant. “You saw it tonight. How they watched you. How they measure every word. Ritter rules by fear, and my husband by suspicion. One more death, and the whole camp may turn upon itself.” She drew a ragged breath. “I cannot stand among them with nothing. I cannot survive it alone.”

I held my tongue, letting her words fall under their own weight. Years of tending the dying had taught me that silence was sometimes the only remedy.

Her gaze did not waver. It fixed on me with sudden intensity, and her voice dropped to a whisper. “But you listen. You look at me as if I were more than another mouth to feed. You make me feel safe. Do you understand? Safe, as I have not felt since leaving Hamburg.”

“Elise—” I began, but she stepped closer, her hand brushing my sleeve. The touch startled me for the sudden intimacy of it.

“You are kind,” she pressed on, urgent now, her breath quickening. “Kind when no one else dares to be. You carry yourself as if nothing here can break you. And I—I find myself thinking of you, even when I should not.”

Her hand, which had lingered at my sleeve, slid lower, brushing across my waist until her fingers found the edge of my belt. The contact jolted me, a shock of awareness that this was no longer words but demand. My pulse leapt and my cheeks burned with a sudden, scalding sense of exposure.

“Tell me it is wrong,” she breathed. Her face was close, her eyes searching mine, bright with hunger of a different kind. “Tell me you feel nothing, and I will leave. But do not stand there in silence, for silence feels too much like permission.”

Her breath was warm at my cheek. For an instant I faltered, frozen in the space between refusal and speech. In that heartbeat her fingers worked clumsily at the buckle, tugging once, twice, until the leather gave. 

The desperation in her voice chilled me more than her touch. It was the plea of one drowning, seizing whatever hold she could find, heedless of the ruin it might drag down with her. For a moment I saw the whole of her misery: a life turned to ash, bound to a man she did not love, in a place where hope itself rotted. And I, foolishly, had become her proof that some scrap of kindness still survived.

I set my hand over hers, steady, unshaking, and spoke as plainly as I could. “This is not the way.”

Her fingers clutched at me as though to deny me, but I caught her wrist, firm but not harsh, and eased her hand aside.

“You are not yourself tonight,” I said. “Your despair speaks louder than you do. Go back before harm is done—to you, to me, to us all.”

For an instant her face was so close I could see the pulse at her throat, quick and uneven. Then something shuttered in her eyes. She drew back sharply, clutching her skirts as if to hold herself together, the tremor of her hand still ghosting where it had been.

The forest pressed close around us, hushed but for the sea’s distant roar. And then I felt it—a prickle at the back of my neck, as certain as a hand laid there. Someone was watching. I turned, peering into the dark between the trees. The firelight flickered faintly through the branches, but the faces were lost in shadow. Whether it was one pair of eyes or many, I could not tell.

Elise drew a sharp breath, as if she too sensed it. But she only whispered, “Very well,” and slipped past me, back toward the glow of the camp. Her skirts brushed the earth, and in a moment she was gone.

I stood alone, pulse hammering, the night thick around me. The ghost of her touch still burned, damning in its clarity.

Then a step sounded behind me—soft, deliberate. I turned, soldier's instinct half ready to defend myself, and found Holmes emerging from the trees. His face was shadowed, the bandage at his brow stark in the faint light.

“You were not alone,” he said simply.

I opened my mouth, then closed it. My hands were still clumsy at my waist, fumbling with the buckle Elise had loosed. Holmes’s gaze dropped, took in the half-fastened belt, then lifted back to mine. His eyes were sharp but not accusing — only searching, measuring.

I muttered, “I know,” and tried to force the leather through its loop, but my fingers shook.

Holmes stepped nearer. Without a word, he caught the strap, threaded it deftly, and fastened the buckle. His touch was steady, practical, yet the closeness of it made my throat ache. When he let go, his hand lingered a moment at my hip before falling away.

“Come back to the fire, Watson,” he said at last. His voice was low, even. “Whatever was seen, better we face it together than let them decide the tale without us.”

We walked back in silence, the glow of the camp drawing nearer, every flicker of flame feeling like the eye of judgment.

The fire still burned low when we returned, but talk had ebbed into silence. A few faces lifted as we crossed the clearing—Greta’s sharp glance, Hans’s scowl half-hidden in shadow, Müller’s gaze fixed unblinking on Elise where she had resumed her place. No one spoke, yet the weight of their eyes clung to me like smoke until we ducked back into the lean-to.

Inside, the air was close with salt and ash. Holmes lowered himself onto his blanket with a stiffness that betrayed his fatigue, though he gave no word of it. I sat beside him, every muscle aching, but the weariness in me was more than bone-deep. For a moment I simply listened — to the faint rasp of his breath, the crackle of the fire outside. The silence pressed in here too, but different: not judgment, but a hush that belonged to us alone.

For a time neither of us spoke. Then Holmes turned onto his side, his voice quiet but unyielding. “Watson, what passed tonight will not stay in whispers. It has shifted something in them.”

“I know.” My mouth was dry. “And I fear I made matters worse by going with her at all.”

He shook his head, slow. A pause. His gaze held mine, and there was nothing detached in it. “Tell me truly… are you unharmed?”

The words caught me like a hand to the chest. I drew a breath, but it came rough, unsteady. “I am… unsettled,” I admitted.

His expression did not change, yet his hand moved across the blanket until it found mine. The warmth of it startled me more than Elise’s touch had, for here it was given without demand. His fingers closed firmly over mine, not fleeting this time, but certain.

“She mistook kindness for promise,” he said. “But I know what binds you. And I would not have you bear her desperation as though it were your failing.”

The grip of his hand steadied me more than any oath could. I let out a breath and pressed my palm back against his, a brief clasp, but enough. “Thank you,” I said softly.

We lay together after that, our hands parted but the closeness of him anchoring me. Outside the camp shifted restlessly, the sea breathed beyond the palisade, but within that narrow canvas shelter the world felt distant. Alone at last, I found a measure of peace.

Sleep came in fragments, broken by dreams of eyes in firelight, of voices muttering just beyond hearing. Each time I woke, Holmes was awake too, his gaze steady on the canvas above, his profile unreadable but his nearness unmistakable.

I rose once in the small hours, restless and parched, and stepped beyond the lean-to. The fire had sunk to a low glow, its smoke drifting in a sluggish column toward the palisade. I crossed the clearing to fetch water, but the few who still sat awake shifted as I passed. Greta drew her children closer beneath her arm; Hans’s gaze followed me too long from the shadows where he split wood. Even Ernst, slumped half-asleep on the log, stirred enough to glance up and then look quickly away.

No word was spoken, yet the silence pressed harder than any accusation. I returned to my place beside Holmes with the uneasy knowledge that the camp did not sleep so soundly as it seemed.

By dawn I was not rested, only raw—and the clearing outside was already stirring with unease.

Dawn bled slowly into the camp, grey light seeping through the gaps in the palisade. The air smelled of smoke and salt, the same as every morning, yet something was different. Even before the fire was coaxed back to life, I felt it: a tautness in the air, a quiet that was not fatigue but waiting.

The rations were thinner than ever. Ritter ladled them out in silence, his scar bright in the morning light. Elise was not at his side. At first no one spoke of it. Her children clung to Greta’s skirts, and it was easy to believe she lingered in their hut. But when the bowls emptied and still she did not appear, the silence grew pointed.

I felt the shift before anyone gave it voice. Heads turned toward me, then away again. A cough smothered. A spoon set down too hard. It was as if her absence had already been explained — not by chance, but by the memory of the night before, when she had walked with me into the dark and returned apart.

Müller’s spoon sat untouched before him. His jaw worked, grinding on silence, until at last he muttered, low but clear enough for all to hear, “She would not vanish of her own accord.” His eyes cut toward me and did not waver. The weight in them was heavier than words.

Klara moved with unusual restlessness, her hands worrying the hem of her sleeve, her eyes darting to every corner of the clearing as if expecting Elise to appear. At last she rose. She crossed the clearing quickly, went to Elise’s hut, ducked inside. The silence stretched until she emerged again, her jaw set, her eyes shadowed. “She is not there,” she said simply.

The murmurs thickened into something darker. A child whimpered, hushed quickly by his mother’s hand. Some called Elise’s name sharply, as though she might yet answer from the trees. Others muttered of the night, of footsteps, of silence where there should have been breath.

Müller’s voice cut through them, sharper now, though still low. “She was with him. We all saw.” He did not rise, did not shout — but the words struck harder for being spoken so flatly, as if the matter were already settled.

The weight of the camp’s eyes fell on me like a stone. I opened my mouth, but Holmes’s hand touched my sleeve, a warning to hold. His gaze flicked to Müller then, sharp and weighing, before settling back on Ritter, who had not moved — the ladle still in his hand as though nothing in the world had changed.

I could not speak. Elise’s face burned in my mind — not the lifeless mask I had yet to see, but the living one from the night before, drawn close to mine, her breath hot with despair, her hand fumbling at my belt. That same hand, now absent, now nowhere. If even I could not forget it, how much more damning must it have looked to the eyes that watched from the firelight?

A long silence stretched, broken only by the hiss of the fire. Then Ernst’s voice split it, calling from beyond the gate, sharp with shock. “Here! By the tide!”

The camp surged to its feet, a stumbling procession down the narrow track. The morning mist clung to the rocks, thick and cold, and the sea hissed in and out with tireless breath.

There, half-hidden in a tide pool, lay Elise. Her hair streamed like weed in the water, pale strands drifting with each pull of the tide. Her face, once lit with urgency only hours before, was turned blankly to the sky, the eyes open but glassed with seawater. One arm floated just beneath the surface, pale and slack as driftwood, the hand that had clutched at me now limp and formless. The sea moved her with indifference, rocking her against the rocks until her cheek was scored red.

The cry that went up was raw—grief, fear, accusation breaking in jagged pieces. Greta clutched the children to her skirts, turning their faces from the sight. Hans spat a curse into the wind. Müller gave a sound that was neither word nor sob, his body pitched forward as if he might throw himself to the tide after her. Behind them the others muttered, a rising, shapeless noise like the growl of some animal cornered.

The body was borne back from the tide, laid upon the stones, and the camp gathered in a ring about her. No one spoke to me, yet I felt the circle’s weight tighten like a noose. They did not stand close; a gap remained where Holmes and I kept apart, as though the very earth had marked us off. Their whispers ran together into a low hum, but the eyes that fixed upon me needed no words. It was less a vigil than a tribunal, and I its silent subject.

It was Greta who broke the stillness, clutching Elise’s children tight against her skirts. “They are mine now,” she said, her voice sharp enough to carry. Müller lifted his head as if to protest, but Hans cut across him with a curse. “Your wife is dead, and Ritter keeps his silence while we starve. What kind of leader lets this rot take us all?”

The words fell like sparks into dry tinder. Some turned their anger on Ritter, some on Müller, and others still on me. The air grew restless, full of muttering and the shifting of feet, but no hand yet rose.

I could scarcely breathe for the weight of it. To think of her as she had stood with me in the forest, and to see her now, splayed and emptied of all intent, struck through me like a chill that reached the marrow.

The camp lingered by the tide pool long after the body had been retrieved. Some wept, some prayed, most only stared. Holmes and I stood apart until the press of eyes grew too heavy, and he drew me by the elbow into the mist above the rocks.

That night I set down these words by the dim glow of the fire, my hand unsteady. Elise’s voice still rang in my ears, her breath against my cheek, her fingers clutching at me as though to anchor herself to life. Only hours later, I saw those same fingers pale and slack upon the tide.

It is a cruel thing to hold the memory of a face both burning with desire and emptied of breath in the same day. Crueler still to know the living fix their eyes on me as though her end were mine to answer for. Hunger gnaws at us all, yet it is suspicion that will hollow this camp faster than want of bread.

Chapter Text

They buried Elise where the soil yielded easiest, near the rough cross that marked three other mounds. The ground was damp, salted by the sea wind, and each spadeful turned sluggish, as though reluctant to give. No prayers were spoken. The children’s cries rose thin and keening, like gulls wheeling over carrion, while Müller stood rigid, his jaw clenched against any sound.

I helped lower her, though my hands shook as they caught the coarse sailcloth. She weighed too little—the husk of a woman who had poured herself into the camp until nothing remained but silence. When the earth struck her shroud, the muffled thud seemed to hollow my chest with every fall.

The others stood fixed, yet it was not grief alone that pressed upon them. Faces flickered from one to another, then fastened on us. Holmes beside me was still as a carved idol, his grey eyes distant, but I felt the change: we were no longer only watched. We were singled out.

When the grave was closed, Klara knelt and laid her hand to the mound as she had at Kappel’s. This time it trembled. “She was kind,” she said softly. “Kind, and it was not enough.”

Her words loosed a stir among them. Hans muttered of curses, the island claiming its tithe. Ernst spat and crossed himself. Greta clutched her children, whispering that sin breeds ruin.

The mound had scarcely settled, the earth still raw and damp, yet already it bore not only the weight of her body but of their blame.

And Müller—Müller’s gaze found me across the fresh earth, sharp and burning. He spoke nothing, yet his silence struck louder than any oath.

Holmes touched my arm as we turned away, steering me toward the lean-to. His whisper, meant for me alone, carried like a chill: “The fever has begun, Watson. And it will not be quenched with earth.”

The day dragged like no other. The burial had leeched the strength from them, but no labor filled the void that followed. Men sat with their tools loose in their hands; women stirred the fire without appetite. The camp seemed to breathe shallowly, as though the air itself were rationed. Eyes seldom met mine, save in quick, sidelong glances that slid away at once.

Holmes and I kept apart. He walked the palisade with his usual air of calculation, but I knew the purpose was not the timber. It was the watchers: who followed our steps, whose gaze lingered longest. Once he paused, a hand braced briefly against the wood, his fingers pressing to his temple. When he saw me watching, he straightened at once, his face set smooth, but I could not forget the falter. 

I moved among the sick, though even that service had grown brittle. Greta allowed me to cool her boy’s brow, but her stare fixed upon me like a blade. Hans’s wife pulled her leg from my hands before I had finished binding it, whispering a prayer as if my touch itself could invite ruin.

When I went to take a place near the fire, the man beside it shifted his bowl and rose without a word, leaving the spot bare between us. It was a small thing, yet it stung more than curses.

By afternoon the whispers clung thicker than the smoke. A word caught in German as I passed: Unglück. Ill-omen. Another: Hexerei. Witchcraft. The syllables curled like sparks, flaring and vanishing, yet leaving their scorch.

Klara heard them too. I saw her cross the camp more than once, kneeling beside Greta, speaking softly to Hans’s wife, her hand light on an idle shoulder. Her voice was low but insistent, urging patience, reminding them of Elise’s kindness. Each time the muttering dimmed, but only for a breath. Fear seeped back, thicker than before, and her smile thinned with the effort of holding them together.

Holmes noted her labor with a slight incline of the head. When I sat beside him at the water cask, he leaned close enough that only I could hear.
“Fear is a contagion swifter than fever. They have already chosen their scapegoat. And they look at you.”

I flinched. “I gave her nothing. I—”

“Watson.” His hand pressed lightly at my wrist. “I know. But reason is a thin shield against hunger.”

I pulled from him, too sharply. “And am I to bow my head while they spit their poison? Shall I bear guilt for kindness offered?”

“Better that than give them the quarrel they seek,” he said, eyes on the circle of huts. “One spark, and this camp will blaze.”

“Perhaps it would be well if it did,” I muttered. “At least then the matter would burn itself clean.”

His gaze snapped to mine, hard and cold. “You mistake the fire, Watson. It does not purify. It consumes.”

We sat in silence after that, but the air between us was as tight as the air around the camp. Even Klara’s efforts grew more frantic, her voice trembling as she hushed another quarrel at the water cask. I caught her glance once, and I knew she felt the fabric of the colony straining past her strength.

Toward evening Müller rose from his place by the fire and left without a word. No one followed, but all eyes tracked him as he passed. Klara’s most of all, her face hollow with the knowledge she could not stop what was coming.

The sky thickened, the sea struck louder against the stones, and we waited. It was not yet accusation, not yet blood. But the hush was not peace. It was the pause before the storm’s first lash.

Night closed in thick and airless. The fire burned low, its light cutting faces into planes of flame and shadow. No one spoke above a murmur. Even the children were hushed, pressed close to their mothers as though they, too, sensed the storm crouching over us.

Klara moved among them once more, her hand brushing shoulders, her words urging calm. “Enough of whispers,” I heard her murmur. “We must hold fast together.” But even as she spoke, the eyes she sought slid past her, drawn again to me and Holmes. Her voice frayed; her smile, once steady, trembled at the edges.

Holmes and I sat near the rim of the circle, his shoulder pressed against mine. He watched the fire with that intent stillness I knew so well, yet there was a brittleness to it: the faint slackening of his jaw, the way his hand rested too heavily on his knee, as though the effort of keeping still cost him. When others stared at us too long, he did not blink, but I felt the strain in the rigid set of his arm.

Across the circle Klara lifted her hand, as if to still the murmur, her voice breaking on the words. No one heeded her. The silence bent toward Müller instead.

And it was Müller who shattered the hush. He rose suddenly, his bowl tipping, thin broth hissing into the dirt. His face was twisted, whether by drink or grief I could not say, but his voice rang out sharp.

“She was with him,” he cried, stabbing a finger toward me. “All of you saw it. She sought him out in the dark, and now she is dead.”

A ripple passed through the camp. Some muttered assent; others dropped their gaze. Ritter did not stir, but the muscle in his scarred jaw worked hard. Klara closed her eyes briefly, as though bracing herself against a blow.

I was on my feet before I knew it, blood hammering in my ears. “I did not—”

“You did,” Müller spat, surging over my words. “She was seen with you. Heads bent close, your hands upon her. Do you deny it?”

The circle leaned inward, suspicion thick as smoke. I felt their stares like coals on my skin. Beside me Holmes rose, though slower than I expected, his breath catching faintly as he straightened. He set himself by my side, his presence as much a bulwark as any wall. In the firelight his pallor showed stark, and the tremor in his hand betrayed how dearly the effort cost him.

“My companion denies nothing that is true,” he said. His voice was steady, but the edge was dulled, as though each word cost him. “He gave her kindness, as he would to any soul in despair. And she is not dead by his hand, nor by mine.”

“Then whose?” Müller snarled. “She vanishes into the night with him, and come dawn lies in the sea like driftwood. Do you call that chance?”

The fire crackled, throwing sparks into the dark. The frail scaffolding of order trembled; one word more, and it would fall.

Holmes’s gaze swept them, cold and deliberate, yet I saw the faint tremor at the corner of his mouth, the shadow beneath his eyes. “We do not yet know whose hand struck her down. But mark this: to accuse in ignorance is to dig another grave. If you condemn the wrong man, the true killer walks still among you—and he will not stop.”

For a breath the camp held still, the fire hissing in the silence. Then Müller surged forward. His bowl struck the earth with a dull splash, and his hand closed on the haft of a tool by the fire—a rough-handled axe, its edge dull but heavy.

He came at me with a guttural shout. I stumbled back, the world narrowing to the arc of wood and iron.

Holmes moved first. His hand shot out, catching Müller’s wrist before the blow could fall, twisting with a precision born of old training. The axe thudded harmlessly into the dirt. But even as he wrenched Müller aside, I heard the catch in his breath, saw the sudden strain carve lines deep into his face.

“Enough,” Holmes snapped. His voice was sharp, but the rasp beneath it made my stomach turn.

Müller strained against him, spitting curses, his face blotched with rage. The settlers pressed in close, voices rising in a fevered mix—some calling for restraint, others urging the blow. Greta’s boy began to wail, thin and piercing, and even that sound seemed to feed the frenzy. Holmes held fast, but I felt his grip falter, his knuckles whitening with the effort, the tremor running along the sinew of his arm. His eyes burned, yet there was a fevered sheen to them, as though he stood on the edge of breaking. Dread coiled in me, not only for the axe but for him.

From the far side of the fire, a figure forced his way between us. Ritter. His scar gleamed pale in the firelight as he seized Müller with both hands and wrenched him back, hurling him aside with brutal strength. The axe clattered to the ground.

“No more!” His roar cut through the camp like a blade. “There will be no blood spilled here tonight!”

The settlers recoiled at once, cowed by his fury. Müller staggered, chest heaving, but made no second charge.

Ritter’s eyes swept the circle, then fastened on us. For a heartbeat I thought his wrath would fall upon Holmes and me as well. Instead, his words came harsh and final: “The killer walks among us still. Strike the wrong man, and we are all damned.”

No one answered. The fire spat and hissed, smoke curling upward, and in its glow I felt the camp fracture—not healed by Ritter’s decree, only lashed together by the weight of his will.

Holmes’s hold eased on my arm, though he did not let go entirely. His face was grim, the bandage stark across his brow, his eyes colder than fear. Yet I saw how the pallor drained him, sweat beading along his temple, his breath ragged from the effort of mastery. It chilled me more than Müller’s fury—for I knew Holmes’s strength was not endless, and he had spent it freely for me.

Ritter’s words cracked like thunder, and for a moment even the sea seemed to still. Müller stood swaying, sweat shining on his skin, eyes blood-bright. Ritter hovered close, his hand near Müller’s shoulder—not resting, yet heavy enough to pin him in place.

Around us the settlers shrank back into shadow. Some turned aside in shame, others muttered low, their voices lost beneath the hiss of smoke. Yet every glance returned to us—Holmes rigid at my side, myself raw and unsteady—marked now as ill luck given human form.

Ritter stooped, lifted the axe, and flung it into the dark. “Sleep, if you can,” he growled. “At dawn we will speak of this again.”

With that he strode from the firelight, and the circle dissolved into uneasy silence.

Holmes’s hand lingered on my arm before he let go. He stood very straight, but I saw the sway in him as though the effort of stillness cost more than movement. He pressed his palm briefly to his temple, then drew it away as if nothing had passed, though the faint sheen on his brow betrayed him. I told myself it was only strain, the toll of too many nights without rest. Yet even as I thought it, a cold weight settled in me.

The camp lay in uneasy quiet. From the lean-to I could hear the last low murmur of voices, a cough muffled in a hut, the restless tread of someone pacing near the fire. Müller, I thought, though I could not be sure. No one had seen him return after Ritter cast him down, yet his rage had not burnt itself out. That knowledge coiled in me like a sickness.

Holmes shifted once or twice beside me, his breath long and measured, until at last the tension bled from him. He had meant to keep watch, I knew, but even he could not fight exhaustion forever. His head sagged against his arm, the bandage at his brow stark in the faint glow, his face hollowed by shadow. A faint groan escaped him once, half-caught in his throat, and then he lay still.

I lay awake longer, my shoulder a steady throb, my mind circling the day’s accusations, Elise’s last words, the faces turned toward me in judgment. Every creak of the palisade set my pulse hammering; each hiss of wind through the gaps felt like a whisper aimed at my name. Once a boot scraped against ash, quick and sharp, then fell silent. The smell of smoke shifted too, heavy with damp, as if someone had stirred the fire only to let it gutter again. I told myself it was nothing—only a settler restless in the dark.

At last fatigue dragged me under into a shallow, fretful doze. But unease clung to me, as though the night itself leaned close, waiting.

Beside me Holmes’s breath grew steady, but the sound carried no comfort. The camp beyond the canvas felt leagues away, a tide pulling back and leaving us stranded. Even his nearness could not soften the truth: he was weakening, and I was alone among them.

Chapter Text

I remember little of the taking—only its violence. A hand clamped over my mouth, the crush of weight pinning me to earth, rope rasping fast and merciless about my wrists. The gag came sodden and sour, stuffing back the cry that rose in me; my shoulder tore open with pain and smothered the rest. Oaths hissed against my ear, rank with drink, while boots grated through volcanic ash. I was dragged like plunder into the dark.

Through it all Holmes lay beside me, unmoving, his face smoothed by the last wash of firelight. That image burns sharper than any blow: his breath lifting quiet, his brow untroubled, as I was wrenched from his side. The warmth of his shoulder left a hollow against mine, a sudden cold that seared worse than rope. I would have called to him had the gag loosed me—yet perhaps it was mercy he did not stir, for their fury would have fallen twice upon him.

Then a blow struck, sudden and blinding. White fire split my skull, the ground heaved beneath, and the world narrowed to a single burst of light before it drained into blackness.

I came to in darkness, my head split by a sharp, hammering pain; the sour reek of brine and sodden cloth thickened on my tongue. For an instant I fancied fever or some cruel dream, but the ropes told otherwise: they bound me hard, wrists and ankles both, each knot sunk deep into flesh until the skin burned. The gag had torn my lips raw, and the stone beneath pressed up unyielding. This was no dream.

The air was rank with mildew, as if the hut had been sealed and left to rot for years. Wind found the broken rafters and slid through them laden with kelp and salt, a sound like a beast coughing in some ruin. The timbers answered with a hollow moan until I could not tell whether the noise came from the boards above or some greater thing outside.

Beneath it all came a steadier torment: a single drop of water, falling somewhere in the black and striking stone with a sharp, accusing note. It measured the room with a patience that felt deliberate, each fall a cold punctuation to the hours I had yet to endure.

Tik. Tik.

I tried to shut it from me, but the rhythm found purchase. There were no other sounds; no scuff of boot, no murmur. Only the drip and the weight of the dark closing round until I thought: so this is to be buried alive—air without air, earth without soil.

Tik. Tik. Tik.

I moved then, a foolish, animal twist. Pain lanced through an injured joint and the cry it tore from me died at once against the foul gag. My ankles jerked and the ropes only cut deeper, as if they were meant to shave me down to the bones. My lungs fought uselessly about the sodden cloth; spit gathered, slick and warm, and ran into the grit beneath my chin.

I stank of rope and sweat and mildew. The smells clung to me as if the hut itself would have me rot there by slow degrees.

Time faltered. I told myself the camp must still lie in sleep—yet perhaps dawn had come already, and with it his hand, reaching for mine. I saw it plain: the empty place beside Holmes, the ragged blanket still warm at the edge where my shoulder had pressed, the hollow in the straw that should have borne my weight. His brow would lift, puzzled first, then struck by a dread too sudden to name. That picture burned clearer than the ropes at my wrists. The thought of his fingers meeting only cold cloth weighed heavier than any stone.

Elise’s face swam up once more, unbidden, pale and water-logged, hair streaming like weed. Her eyes opened with questions I could not answer. Had I lingered too near? Spoken too softly? Did my weak indulgence spark the fire that consumed her? The gag stilled my mouth, yet questions need no tongue; they seared through the pounding in my skull until shame itself seemed another wound.

The drip went on, no longer water but a voice pared down to syllables. Tik—each fall a name, each name a charge. Witch. Guilty. Sin. Driftwood. Grave. They tangled until I could no longer tell which struck from stone and which rang within my own skull. It was no mere leak, but a tribunal convened in darkness, and I lay bound beneath its hammer.

Then, with a cruelty worse than the sound itself, the drip ceased. Silence pressed in close, unnatural as a held breath, and I knew it waited only for me to break.

A sound split the stillness: the rasp of a boot against stone, slow and deliberate, each scrape drawing closer like a file across bone. My heart jolted. I turned my head, straining against the ropes, but the only light was a weak spill of moon through the roof’s broken seams, too thin to show his face.

Breath, close—rank, sour with spirits—washed the air around me. Then a voice, low, steady, almost intimate in its quiet.

“You thought her yours.”

The words froze me as surely as the ropes. I knew the voice not only in sound but in weight, each syllable soaked with the bitterness I had heard muttering across the fire.

Müller.

I jerked helplessly; the cords bit deeper, the gag cutting my mouth as though punishing me for recognition. He wanted me awake to him. He wanted each word to land like a blow I could not parry.

“I saw,” he breathed, so low it seemed the dark itself must not overhear. “At the fire. In the trees. The way she bent to you. The way you bent back.” His boots rasped closer, deliberate as the drip in the corner. “You touched her arm. She let you.”

Silence stretched. His breath hitched, rough, as if torn between grief and rage. “She should have been mine. Mine. But she smiled at you. Soft for you. Outsider. Thief.”

Something scraped the stone—a weight shifted, heavy, threatening—and the hut seemed to contract around me, boards pressing inward. His voice cut through it, sudden and sharp as steel against the throat. “She gave you what she denied me. Tell me it isn’t so. Tell me.”

He drew a long, sour breath, and his shadow spread long across me, swallowing even the moon’s meagre seam. “She mocked me with you,” he murmured, almost tender. “I stopped her laughter. And now…” His tone thickened, curling into something like pleasure. “…now I will stop yours.”

The gag was torn from me, the foul cloth scraping my lips raw as it came free. I tried to cry out, but his hand clamped hard at once, sealing nose and mouth in one crushing grip. My chest heaved helplessly; ribs strained; the ropes cut deep as I thrashed against them. Panic surged swift and merciless, a tide breaking over me with no air beneath it.

He leaned close and held me there, watching. Not as an enemy demands surrender, but as a man harvesting fear. His breath seared my cheek, rank with spirits, hot with sweat. The stink filled my skull until thought itself turned foul. Darkness narrowed at the edges of my sight, my lungs clawing for air that would not come. For one dreadful instant I was certain he meant to smother me outright, to drink in the last convulsion.

Then, as suddenly as it began, he let go. Air rushed in jagged, violent, scorching as it hit my starved lungs. I coughed, gagging on the ghost of the rag, tasting salt and iron from my own torn mouth. Relief staggered me, dizzy and fragile. I tried to drag another breath—

—but he seized it back. With practised ease he rammed the sodden cloth between my teeth once more, knotting it deeper, tighter, until the fibres cut the corners of my mouth. The small mercy was sealed away.

His laugh rasped against my ear, not loud but edged with triumph, like a blade drawn slow.

“You’ll learn,” he hissed. “The world takes back what it never meant you to have.”

He paused there, long enough for my ragged breath to steady, long enough for me to hope the lesson had ended. His silence was worse than speech. He let me hang in it, ribs aching, head ringing, until I felt the ropes themselves grow heavier with waiting.

Then his smile shifted in the dark. “Are you thirsty?”

He drew out a dented tin, the sound of it dull against stone. When he moved, the water inside sloshed with a keen, cutting note sharper than steel. My throat convulsed at once; thirst tore through me with a force greater than pain. I had already guessed the game, but my body betrayed me.

Slowly, deliberately, he brought the tin towards my lips. A trembling thread of silver clung to the rim, moonlight caught and held as though the world had narrowed to that fragile line. I craned forward without thought, cracked lips parting, wrists screaming as the ropes bit deeper. Everything—pain, fear, shame—fell away before that single drop.

At the last instant his wrist flicked. The stream spat into the dust at my feet, hissing, vanishing.

I could not look away. The stain spread dark across the stone, and my eyes fixed on it as if the water might gather itself again, climb back into the tin and save me. My tongue swelled against the gag, dry and swollen.

Müller bent close, breath sour and hot against my cheek. “Not yet,” he whispered. “You’ll drink when I decide. You’ll beg first.”

His hand brushed my face in a parody of tenderness, thumb pressing the rag deeper, grinding mildew and salt against my tongue. The fibres rasped my gums; I gagged, helpless. “Until then,” he breathed, “the thirst will keep you company.”

The tin clattered to the floor and rolled a little before settling. His gaze did not follow it. Instead he lingered on me with slow, patient cruelty, his eyes tracking the drool slicking my chin, the ropes that had carved blood-dark furrows into my wrists.

“You wallow like a beast,” he murmured. “Drooling, twitching, waiting to be fed.” His breath rasped the words close to my ear. “Is this what binds him to you? Is this what makes him guard you like a wife? Does he kiss that spit from your mouth? Does he cherish you even like this?”

Shame seared hotter than the ropes. My lungs burned, my shoulder screamed with every tremor, but worse was the weight of his gaze. I shook, useless, and tears stung hot in my eyes yet refused to fall—salt against salt, all of it trapped in me. He crouched lower, boards creaking beneath him, and studied my torment with the slow relish of a man savoring strong drink.

“When they find you,” he said, each word measured, inevitable, “they will not mourn. They will call it justice. And him? Even he will see it at last. He will see what he tied himself to, and he will spit your name with the rest.”

The words hung thick as his reek. For a moment I thought he would end it—strike, choke, cut, and be done. But instead he rose, slow as if to prolong the dread. Boots rasped across the stone; the door grated shut. Darkness fell heavier than soil on a grave.

The drip in the corner began again, merciless in its patience. My wrists wept under the cords; my mouth burned with salt and cloth. His voice, though gone, beat on in my skull until I could no longer tell which thoughts belonged to me and which were his.

Tik, tik—guilty.
Tik—witch.
Tik—grave.

Silence pressed in. Only the drip endured, steady and cruel.

Pain gnawed in waves, never still. My wrists burned where the ropes had cut—raw, slick with damp warmth. My shoulder throbbed with each shallow breath, a fire that flared into sparks every time I moved. Thirst scalded my throat until even swallowing felt like knives drawn across dry stone. I twisted once, twice, but the cords only sank deeper, leaving me shaking in the dark like some wounded beast caught in its own snare.

Tik. Tik. Tik.

Elise’s face rose out of the black. Pale, bloated, hair fanned like weed in the tide, her eyes carried questions heavier than any rope. Her lips moved in silence, but I heard the words all the same: You lingered. You spoke too kindly. You gave him cause.

Her gaze weighed on me with the weight of the sea itself. Her shroud clung to her hair, streaming like kelp across her brow. Each breath I drew felt stolen, as though I sipped from the air she had lost.

The drip would not relent.

Tik. Tik. Tik.

With every fall her mouth shaped new syllables.

Tik—lingered. Tik—kindly. Tik—guilty.

I shut my eyes hard, but darkness only deepened her presence. The rhythm pressed harder, and her voice threaded itself into the sound.

Tik. Tik—mine, mine, mine.

I bit down until blood salted my tongue, a useless defense. Still the words seeped through, dripping steady as water through stone.

Tik—mine. Tik—guilty. Tik—yours.

She leaned nearer. I felt the brush of her lips against my ear, the cold drag of drowned hair across my cheek. The gag clogged my mouth, choking back the cry, and still she whispered on.

I jerked against the ropes; pain tore through my shoulder; the stone spun beneath me, and the dark pressed close as a coffin.

Then—the latch scraped. A hinge groaned.

The vision split like glass. Her face fell away into shadow as the door yawned wide, spilling a harsher dark across the floor. Boots rasped slow on stone, heavy and deliberate. The air thickened with the stench of spirits, sweat, and salt.

Müller.

He filled the door frame, blotting what little moonlight leaked through the roof. His face looked drawn tight, lips cracked, eyes burning with a sleepless fever that had hollowed him from within. He crouched close, the reek of spirits rolling off him until the air itself turned sour. For a long, awful moment he only stared. The silence pressed down heavier than his shadow.

Then, low and rough, he whispered: “She says it too, doesn’t she? You hear her.”

The words seeped into me like damp. He leaned nearer, and the heat of him stifled what air I had. “She tells you what I saw with my own eyes. That you took her. That you made her smile. That you killed her.”

His hand shot out sudden as a striking snake. Fingers tangled in my hair, he wrenched my head back until fire tore through my neck and shoulder. The cry lodged in my chest; the gag swallowed it down.

“You feel it, don’t you?” His voice rasped against my ear. “Her hands on you. Her eyes on you even now.”

He slammed my skull against the stone once, twice. Sparks burst behind my eyes; my body convulsed, the ropes carving deeper with every thrash. Still he bent close, breath thick with spirits. “I can make her voice louder,” he murmured. “I can make her speak through your bones.”

He shoved me forward until my face ground into the dirt, grit filling my nose, mildew burning my throat. He held me there until I thought he meant to smother me in earth itself. When he drew me up again, it was slow, careful, as if weighing exactly how much I might bear before breaking.

“You want me to finish it,” he whispered, fist still tangled in my hair. “One hard pull, one twist of steel, and you would be free. But that is not what she would want.” His breath came hot across my cheek. “She would want you to feel it. Every drop of thirst. Every breath choked back. Every prayer unanswered.”

His thumb dragged slow across my face, leaving a smear of grime. My skin crawled beneath it, yet he seemed pleased with the mark.

Then he released me. I sagged in the ropes, lungs heaving, shoulder screaming. He did not strike again. Instead he began to circle, boots rasping against the stone, the drip in the corner keeping its pitiless time.

Tik… tik… tik…

Round and round he went, never leaving. At last he crouched again, close enough that the gleam of his eyes caught the seam of moonlight. “You think he will come for you.” His voice dipped, soft now, almost coaxing, as though confiding a secret. “Always at your side. Always his hand on your arm.”

I flinched before I could stop myself; the ropes jerked taut and burned. His smile came quick and thin, the smile of a man amused by a private joke. “I see it,” he breathed. “The way he watches you. Guards you. The way you lean together, as if the rest of us were already ghosts. Do you think we are blind?”

His hand pressed flat against my chest, steady, almost tender. Yet the weight pinned me harder than any blow. He held his palm there as if listening for my heart. His voice slid lower, a parody of a lover’s murmur.

“You imagine him rising. Calling your name. Fire in his eyes.” A chuckle, low and thick. “But what if he only dreamt? What if he lies heavy as stone, breath sweetened by what I slipped into his cup?”

The suggestion curled in the dark, cold as sea-water. His eyes fixed on mine, hungry for the moment hope broke. “He will not come. I have made certain he will not come. And when I leave you broken, will he cling to you still? Or will he see what you are—and turn away?”

I shook my head, desperate, but the gag bit deep, and the ropes held. The drip went on.

Tik. Tik. Tik.

He rose, boots rasping the stone, and began to pace. The scrape carved a circle I could not step outside; each pass behind me made my body flinch as if bracing for a blow that never fell. His voice came sideways, seeping through the dark, as though it had always been there.

“You think him steadfast. That his devotion will outlast all. But love sours in the open air. What man can stomach the filth you share once it is named aloud? The way you lie together—man and wife, beast and mate. Do you think he will not sicken when every tongue spits it out?”

He slowed when he reached my head, close enough that the heat of him washed over me. “What are you, Watson? Elise’s whore? His whore? Both?” His voice roughened into a growl. “You foul them both with your need. And one is already dead.”

The drip struck stone.

Tik. Tik. Tik.

He circled again, letting that sound mark my small world. Each time nearer, until at last he leaned down and his breath filled my ear. “Soon enough he will see you as I do—filth, ill-omen, a weight he can set down. He will be clean again. Only you will rot.”

His hand seized my jaw, wrenching my head back until the cords at my throat dug like wire. He forced my eyes upward into the moon-slit rafters until the world tilted with strain. Then, slow and deliberate, he drew a nail across the raw edge of my temple. Pain flared—white, sudden—and a ribbon of blood welled and ran.

He watched it as if tasting it. With the same thumb that had pressed into my lips, he smeared the blood down across my cheek and into the corner of my mouth. The copper stink filled my nose; the gag soaked it up and left a metallic burn on my tongue.

“See how it stains you,” Müller murmured, almost delighted. “You wear her like a brand.” He dragged his thumb over my lips, smearing the line into my beard, and laughed—low, pleased—at the ruin he had made of me.

I tried to wrench away; my shoulder screamed, my lungs burned. He held me a moment longer, cataloguing each contortion, then flung my head aside. Stone met bone; stars burst at the edges of my sight. I sagged in the ropes, half-blind, cheek raw, mouth fouled with blood and cloth.

He stood over me for a long, slow minute, shadow blotting out the moon. Then his boots scraped once, twice, drawing nearer until his breath filled the hut and the drip beneath it became a metronome—

Tik. Tik. Tik.

Each beat a cruel clock.

The door did not close.
The dark did not change.

Tik. Tik. Tik. Tik.

I cannot set down all that followed. Even now the ink blurs beneath my hand. Some degradation must not be recorded; some I cannot bear to see shaped in words. I remember the knife, its edge cold at my throat, the stench of spirits, the weight of his breath. I remember thinking my last sight would be the slats of moonlight above, and that Holmes would find nothing but my body left in the tide.

The rest I put aside. It is enough to say that Müller left me living, though no longer whole. I lie awake still, hearing his voice as if it clung to the stones, and the drip as if it still mocked me.

Tik. Tik. Tik.

If Holmes reads this, let him know: I did not despair of him. Not once. It was the thought of his step, his voice, the certainty of his pursuit, that held me when the dark pressed closest. But let him not ask what was done, for I cannot write it without filth clinging to my hand.

Chapter Text

The gag had slipped sideways, sour with spit, the cloth rasping the corner of my mouth until the skin split. My shirt lay half-open where Müller had torn it; the cloth was stiff with sweat, salt, grime. One sleeve twisted down my arm, the rope biting the bare flesh until every pulse flared like a coal under my skin. 

Outside, the night pressed close; the sea hammered under the floor like some vast thing trying to climb up through the timbers. My wrists burned with each tiny start against the rope. When I shifted, grit ground into the skin, sharp as a splinter. The damp clung cold to the bruises that mapped me.

The hut reeked of him. Stale drink clung to the boards, smoke lay low in the thatch, and beneath both a heavier smell—unwashed flesh baked into timber. His absence did nothing to cleanse it. The air felt populated by him still, as if he crouched in every shadow, eyes bright with malice. Even the walls seemed to lean inward, pressing me down as if to keep me small.

I tried to put my thoughts in order and failed. Every sound bent itself toward him—timbers creaking, wind whispering through the thatch—until the little room seemed to speak in his voice. My pulse sounded in my ears, a frantic drum.

Then boots: steady, certain. Wrong, not the hesitant tread of a settler. Each step struck like a bell on the boards, nearer and nearer until it pressed against my skull. Terror rose with it—hope or dread, I could not tell which.

The tread came closer, too solid for a fevered dream. My head jerked; light and shadow smeared. For an instant I could not tell if Müller had returned.

The latch snapped. Cold air cut in, salt and night blowing through the stench. A figure filled the doorway—stark, pale against the gloom.

“Watson.”

The voice was scraped out, raw and thin. For a heartbeat I shrank inward, certain of Müller. Only when the shape lurched forward, hair falling damp against the brow, did I know him. Holmes—gaunt, ghostly white. The bandage across his forehead was streaked with blood, eyes large and fever-bright.

He came across the floor in a ragged stumble and dropped to his knees beside me. His hands went to the cords, clumsy and fumbling. He tugged and slipped, tugged again, and the knot bit deeper instead of yielding. His breath came in harsh bursts, hot against my ear, thick with fever. Whatever had driven him here had left him far from whole.

I tried to lift my head; it tipped and fell again like a rag doll. His hands worried at the ropes—fumbling, trembling—at first seeming to loosen, then only sawing the fibres raw until the knot drew tighter and I choked. Blood streaked the cord where the bandage had torn, red seeping into the hemp; I knew not whose blood it was. Instead of the neat, surgical movements I knew, he attacked the knot with a blind, animal haste, as though sheer force might replace skill.

“Hold—” he gasped, the word broken, as if he meant to command me to be still, or perhaps himself. His fingers slipped again, nails raking more skin than rope. Each tug set fire through my wrists.

For a moment I recoiled, terror flaring that Müller had returned. The clumsy violence of his touch, the hot rasp of breath at my cheek—it was too near the same. I twisted back, a muffled cry caught under the gag. Only when hair fell damp across my vision did I see him clearly: Holmes, hollowed, pupils blown wide, swaying as if the drug still pooled through his veins. His face hovered close, anguished, and in that instant I could not tell whether it was he who held me or I who kept him from falling.

“Forgive—” The word broke from him in a gasp, hardly shaped. He bit it off at once, as if ashamed of having let it slip. The knot only tightened under his hands, bloodied fingers dragging it smaller with every tug.

His weight settled against me as he wrestled. Every tremor in his body passed into mine. The cords did not give. The gag turned breath into a rasp. I kept my hands away from him, made myself as small as the bindings permitted. At last he sagged, unsuccessful—chest heaving, hands raw; the heat of him sharp with salt. I hung half-upright, wrists on fire, and could not tell whether he held me or I held him.

For a moment there was only his breath against mine, ragged, bloody, but alive. I clung to that frail proof of him, the weight of his body pressed into mine.  The night pressed at the walls, waiting. Every creak in the boards became a footstep, every shift of shadow a crouched form ready to strike. Holmes’s hand still worried at the rope, feeble tugs against the knot.

In the hush between his ragged breaths I caught another sound—boots on gravel, slow, grinding, inexorable.

The tread grew nearer until the earth itself seemed to thrum with each step. Holmes froze against me, breath caught, fingers tightening on the rope as if sheer will might undo it before the latch turned.

Silence cracked. A voice seeped through the boards, thick and close. “You hear it. The same cry she gave.”

Holmes flinched; a tremor ran through the injured arm braced at my side. He turned toward the door, eyes stark, but he made no answer. Only the rasp of his breath, sharp with rage he could not voice.

The latch shifted—not flung, but pressed slow, deliberate, the wood groaning. The bar slipped. A gap widened. Night air bled in, rank with sweat and sour drink.

A shadow lengthened across the floor. He never hurried. Each step was savored, the boards straining under his weight. Holmes’s hand clutched mine still, bloodied and useless at the knot. The rope burned into me, a brand of helplessness binding us both.

He filled the doorway at last, shoulders blotting the night behind him. For a moment he only stood there, head tilted, listening.

“You thought him safe,” he murmured. The words dragged, curdled with drink. His gaze slid to Holmes, crouched and failing. “Weak. Sick. I can smell it on you both.”

The gag turned my protest to a pitiful choke. His head tipped, listening, savoring it.

“That sound,” he whispered, almost tender. “Hers, when I closed her mouth. Kappel, when his laughter died. And now you.”

Holmes’s shoulders heaved, each breath torn raw. “Loose him,” he said, but the voice was frayed, too thin. His body swayed with the effort; his fingers smeared the rope with blood.

Müller gave a low scrape of laughter. “You can scarcely stand. Yet you command? No. You will watch.”

He stepped forward. The boards creaked. Though his hand had not touched me, my body recoiled, shuddering back against Holmes’s chest. Pain sparked down my arms as the cords cut deeper. My stomach turned cold. The room narrowed to his tread, his presence filling every breath.

I had thought myself past terror, after all he had already done. Yet his voice, his step, the weight of him broke me open afresh. The bruises still burned, my shirt hung in rags, and all I could think was again, again, please never again.

Holmes’s arm locked hard around me, an anchor against the dark, but the tremor in him betrayed his weakness. Fury burned in him still, but the body could not keep its promise. I knew he would rise if Müller reached us, even if it killed him. And still I feared this time no rescue would come.

Müller moved slow, deliberate. He did not strike. Instead, he edged nearer, step by step, until his shadow lay across us both. Holmes tried to brace, but his knees wavered; the hand gripping me shook, his strength too ragged to bar the way. Müller slipped past the guard almost gently, as though patience alone had been enough to erode it. His hand came at last—not a blow, but a reach, savouring the space between us—then his fingers wound into my hair and wrenched my head back until the cords bit bone. A guttural sound tore loose from my throat.

“There,” he breathed, leaning so close his sour breath filled my nose. “That is the cry. The choke. The same sound he makes when you—” His mouth twisted, almost pitying. “—when you make him want you.”

Heat and bile surged up my throat. The boards blurred; shadows doubled. My scalp seared, my wrists flamed, my shoulder screamed. I could not look at Müller. I looked instead at Holmes, who lurched upright, one hand braced on the wall, the bandage at his brow gone ragged with blood.

“Release him.” Each word scraped from him, hoarse and raw. His voice held when his body did not.

Müller’s grip tightened, dragging me closer until my chest struck his ribs. “You see?” he rasped, low into my ear. “He trembles for you. He would bleed and break for you. And still—still you are mine.”

The words struck Holmes as much as me. They carried not only the memory of what had been done, but the suggestion that love itself might be made filthy in the same breath. Holmes’s hands twitched useless at his sides; when he turned, his face was emptied into something beyond fury—something like shame.

He lurched forward then, a raw snarl torn from his throat. His shoulder slammed into Müller’s side, driving us all against the boards. The hut shook with the impact, dust sifting from the rafters.

For a moment Müller staggered. His grip tore at my hair, then slipped, only to return harder in his arm crushing round my chest. He hauled me upright, twisting me as a shield, my bound wrists wrenched high until the joint ground in its socket.

Holmes struck again—fists clumsy, strength gone to tremor. One blow landed, splitting Müller’s lip. Blood sprayed hot across my cheek. The triumph lasted only a breath before Müller’s fist cracked into Holmes’s temple—the same wounded side.

The sound—bone on bone, a hollow crack—stole my breath. Holmes reeled, knees buckling, the bandage torn loose to bare the gash beneath. He clung to the wall to stay upright, chest heaving, fury still alive in the eyes though the body shook under it.

Müller’s laugh rumbled low. “This is your champion? Drugged, broken? He cannot even cut a rope.” His arm crushed tighter round me. With a savage jerk he turned us toward the door. “Watch him fail again.”

I stumbled in his grip, half-dragged, wrists on fire, shoulder shrieking. Behind us Holmes lurched to follow, swaying like a man half-conscious, yet still he came.

The door gave way and the night struck sharp as a blade. Cold air lashed my face, salt stinging the raw corners of my mouth. The surf roared at once, vast and pitiless, drowning all but Müller’s rasp at my ear.

He hauled me over the grit, boots skidding on volcanic stone. Each jolt tore fire through my arms, the joint wrenched near to breaking. Behind came pursuit—the scrape of Holmes’s boots, his breath ragged as a saw through wood.

The huts loomed a moment, then vanished. Ahead the land dropped steep to the sea, black water gnashing at the rocks like a thing waiting to feed. The rope cinched hard, dragging me down with him. I knew his intent as surely as I knew the tide: he meant to offer me to it.

The slope pitched treacherous beneath us, grit sliding underfoot. Müller crushed me against his chest, the rope biting fire up my arms. Holmes staggered after, bracing against the stone, his face bloodless in the moon’s wash.

Then all three of us knotted together—Müller hauling, Holmes surging, myself wrenched between. Fists struck, bone on bone, but the blows were wild, dulled by weakness. Salt and iron filled my mouth; I could not tell whose blood.

The ground gave warning before I understood: a low groan, stone shivering alive beneath us. Müller jerked me back, boots grinding, and grit spilled away like sand from a broken glass.

Holmes’s hand clawed in the dark—at Müller’s arm, or at mine, I could not tell. For a heartbeat I thought it was my own weight that dragged him. The rope snapped taut, binding us all in one cruel knot. Müller’s eyes flashed wide, not rage now but something near plea—

Then the ledge betrayed him.

The rock split with a sound like timber riven. The sea rose to claim. His weight vanished in an instant, dragging at me, tearing the rope until it scorched to bone. Then absence—only a cry cut short, a shape swallowed, black surf boiling below as if nothing living had ever touched it.

Holmes and I sprawled back onto the rock, chests heaving, skin flayed raw. The rope dangled loose where it had parted, its ends slick with blood and salt. He stared down into the void, eyes hollow, as if waiting for the sea to spit its meal back. But the tide only roared—tireless, indifferent.

His hands went at once to the knots around my wrists, though they shook so badly he could scarcely find them. Fingers slipped, nails scraping more skin than cord, his blood running warm from temple to wrist.

“Hold still.” The words rasped from him, scraped thin. At last the cord surrendered, fibres whining as they gave way one by one; the last strand snapped and my arms dropped free. The gag slid sodden into my lap, metallic with spit and blood, a sour taste that clung like rust.

I folded against him, hollow. My throat scalded, lungs heaving as though the air itself might flee. He pulled me close, fierce and trembling, knuckles white on my ribs. He held me as if the sea could reach up still and take me in a single greedy motion.

“It is done,” he said, but his voice was empty of belief. His eyes would not leave the black mouth of the water; they searched it for an answer it would never give. The surf filled the night, relentless, indifferent—a tribunal none could appeal.

We moved from the brink leaning hard on one another, neither steady. The broken rope trailed after us, snagging at the stone like a thing unwilling to release its claim, ends smeared with salt and blood. He bore more of my weight than his own, shoulder pressed into mine, yet he would not let me go, as if to release me were to confess some darker truth. Each step made him sway; his lip bled where he bit down on words best left unsaid.

The jungle swallowed the sea’s roar, but its echo clung still in my ears—the cry cut short, the crack of stone, the absence. No peace waited in that silence.

Holmes stumbled beside me, his arm locked around my ribs. Once his head dipped, brushing my hair, his mouth grazing near my temple. Not a kiss—close enough that my body jolted, panic wrenching through me.

He stilled. His arm tightened, then slackened. For an instant his eyes caught mine—dark, unreadable—then turned away. Jaw set, he bore on without a word.

At last the huts rose from the dark. I faltered. How could I walk into those watching eyes, wrists flayed, shirt in rags, Holmes staggering at my side? What tale could we speak that would make them believe?

Even then I thought I saw a lantern shift in the dark ahead, a figure half-turned toward us before slipping back into shadow. Whether it was watchman or witness I could not tell. But I knew: suspicion had not drowned with him. It would rise again, restless as the tide.

I set this down while the ink still blots and the hand shakes. Perhaps it would be better left unwritten, yet I cannot still the mind until the page bears some share of it.

His hands were on me still when the ground betrayed him. Or was it Holmes’s grasp that pulled him down? I cannot swear to it. One moment Müller’s weight crushed me, the next the stone yawned and he was gone.

What remains clear are smaller cruelties: his breath at my ear, the jeer of his voice in the dark. The way my body flinched before he touched me, fearing what had already been done. Even now, free, I feel him at my skin, and I wonder if the sea has truly claimed him or if he walks beside us still, unseen.

Holmes does not speak of it. He stared long into the black water, face hollow, as if awaiting its judgment. I cannot tell whether he fears that he cast the man down, or that he failed to. Perhaps both.

I will not press him. Some truths corrode in the telling. Let this account be vague, confusing; let the edges blur. That is as faithful as memory can be.

It is not the ocean I dread, but the shore above. Eyes wait there, ready to weigh what cannot be proved. Suspicion did not drown with Müller. It rises, even now, restless as the tide.

Chapter Text

The palisade loomed out of the mist like a thing half risen from the water: warped timbers black against the paling sky, teeth of wood bared to the wind. The gate yawed open as though the camp itself had been holding its breath and, at last, decided it could not.

We crossed together, salt crusting our hair, blood streaking our shirts. The settlers were already there, a ragged cordon whose faces the thin light had hollowed into masks. Greta crouched with her children, their small bodies pressed to her like a ward against the world. Hans stood with his hands at his sides as if he had forgotten what to do with them. Ernst stared too long at an unfixable point. Müller’s brother stood a pace forward, all jaw and coiled muscle; only Klara had stepped clear, her shawl wrapped as if to gird against both weather and pleading.

A child tugged at Greta’s skirts and whispered a name—Elise—before she hushed him and pressed his face into her side. The sound hung in the air like smoke before dissolving, as if the dead had leaned close to answer roll call.

Not one of them spoke. No name was dared. The silence was a thing heavier than accusation; it settled on our shoulders like ash. Even the fire seemed to recoil, its smoke climbing slow and sullen into the morning.

Holmes eased me down onto a beam. His hand lingered at my shoulder longer than needful, steadying me though the skin beneath was slick with sweat and blood. When he straightened, the cut at his temple had darkened to a bruise, yet his face under the wan dawn looked composed, like a man presenting evidence before a hostile court. His eyes swept the ring of faces, measuring each as if he might name the one who would break first.

A settler bent as if to help, shifting the timber beneath me. His grip was rough, and the shove jarred my ribs. He muttered something under his breath that I could not catch. The gesture might have been called aid, but I felt the warning in it: we were not received, but enclosed. The circle had teeth, and we were inside it.

The silence stretched taut, every breath in the camp drawn against us. Klara moved at last—not with a leader’s flourish, but with the slow economy of one who had learned that speech cost more than silence. She drew her shawl close and stepped into the gap, and when she spoke her voice had the dry, unyielding quality of parched wood.

“He is gone.”

Three words. No name. No embellishment. They struck the hush and left a hollow that rang in all of us.

Greta’s shoulders heaved. Her children whimpered. Hans stared at the earth like a man who might find an answer there. Ernst crossed himself with a rigid motion. The crowd shifted, an animal adjusting its weight.

Müller’s brother came forward then, the motion of a predator testing distance. His voice was low and rasping, sharpened by hunger and the memory of blows. “What then? What did you do to my brother?”

Holmes’s posture betrayed nothing. He regarded the man as if inspecting a wound and answered without heat. “What was done lies with the sea. Ask the waves what they keep.”

The reply settled like linen on a table—thin, adequate in form but incapable of hiding the shape beneath. A ripple went through the crowd. Some stiffened. Others let a coarser feeling show: relief edged with something darker.

Müller’s brother spat into the dust. “The sea leaves no rope burns,” he said, and his words landed like a thrown stone.

Heads turned then—not toward the surf, but toward me. The cords had marked me; red tracks rose under the skin where rope had cut. My fingers twisted against the blanket in my arms in the only way I could think of to make myself less a witness and more a man.

A murmur ran like wind through dry grass. A man near the fire cropped a laugh that was not a laugh but a sound between despair and anger. “We will not have lies on our tongues,” he said. “Not when our bellies are bare.”

Klara’s hand rose, slow and deliberate. Not a plea but a command. “Quiet,” she said. The syllable folded the air. The brother hesitated, jaw working. He fell back a step, but his eyes burned like embers.

Holmes inclined his head to her—an exact and small gesture. “Madam, if we might speak apart. For the sake of your people.”

The words hung between us like a proposition. The circle thinned and tightened as if it had a pulse. Klara looked at Holmes, then at me. Whatever softness might have been in her face was gone; only the fixed line of someone who counts cost remained.

“This way,” she said at last, and led us from the light of the fire toward the sagging shed at the palisade’s edge. As we passed I heard Müller’s brother mutter, low and bitter: “The sea keeps its dead. Men keep their lies. We will remember which is worse.”

Klara led us to the far edge of the camp where a half-collapsed shed sagged against the palisade. The wind had the sea in its mouth here; it whispered through rotten boards like a thing that would not be silenced. We stopped in the shade of the wall. Klara turned at last, shawl twisted about her as if she could wring answers from the cloth.

“You need not tell me,” she said. Her voice was low, scraped thin by too many nights. “I knew.”

Holmes’s brows rose—an almost imperceptible motion—and then he was still.

“Müller carried it in his eyes,” Klara went on, folding her arms so hard the joints of her fingers whitened. “Since Elise… he did not sleep, and the bottle was his hand. When he spoke, it was poison. He saw enemies where there were none. A man like that finds a way to take what he thinks is owed.” Her mouth tightened. “It was jealousy that soured him. Elise drew back from him, and so she paid the price. Kappel laughed too freely with her, and so he was struck down as well. We all knew, though none dared name it. To speak aloud what everyone feared was to risk his hand turning next. And so silence kept us breathing.”

She paused, her voice flat as stone. “A woman sees what a man will not tell. But what is seen is not always safe to say.”

Her voice faltered, but only for a moment. “I knew he would turn on you. That he would have killed you both. And still I did nothing.” Her gaze shifted to the earth, then back, hardening. “If I had spoken, what would it have mended? They would not have believed me. They would have seen only a woman defending strangers against her own. Better to keep silent and let his hand show itself. Better, if need be, that his madness burn itself out on you than consume us all.”

She steadied her tone the way one steadies an ax before the kill. “He would have killed you both—that much I knew. What I did not know was when.” She looked between Holmes and me—first at the bruise on his temple, then at the red lines on my wrists. “That you lived through him…” Her breath shortened. “That I did not expect.”

I wondered then if Müller’s venom had been aimed first at Holmes because of me—because he had seen too much in the way my friend watched over me. The thought made the rope burns throb afresh, as though the cords had been meant for both our throats.

Holmes bowed his head a fraction, the motion that tells the world he is grave. “Then you see why we could not stand idle.”

Klara’s face closed like a door. “I understand,” she said, but the word had the weight of calculation. “The others will not. They have buried enough. Fear eats them hollow. If they learn Müller is gone by your hand, grief will sour to blame.”

Her eyes came to me and fixed. I could not hold them; they were the eyes of someone who had counted every cost and found the arithmetic ugly but necessary. She drew in a slow, flat breath. “We will say the sea took him. That he fell. An accident.” Her gaze cut between us. “Do not mistake me,” she said. “The lie spares them, not you. You will be remembered as the men who brought him down. Mercy does not mean safety.”

Holmes’s head tilted, the smallest of motions. A flicker crossed his face—distaste, not surprise.

“It will be the story,” Klara pressed, the phrase like a spat of iron. “He went to the cliffs in a madness of grief and drink. The tide took him. No struggle. No blood. Only the sea.”

I swallowed. The salt and cloth at my tongue seemed to thicken. “And they will accept that?”

“They must.” Her answer was a hammer blow. “If not, they will tear one another down until there is no one left to bury. No food. No shelter. Better a lie that binds than a truth that fractures.”

Holmes stared at her then for a long minute, his mouth a line that would not soften. The air between us tasted of compromise. When he spoke, it was not the brittle voice of argument but the slow, tired voice of a man who has chosen practical harm over certain ruin. “A story, then,” he said. It was not eager. It was not clean.

“Call it mercy,” Klara said, and the word fell like a verdict.

He bowed, precise as the signing of a document. “The sea will have him.”

Klara gave a nod that was almost indifferent, then fixed us both with a level look. “And you must think on leaving,” she said. “Soon. The lie will quiet them for a time, but it will not hold. Not with hunger sharpening every glance. Better you find your road while there is still a chance to walk it.”

Her tone allowed no reply. She turned toward the distant crowd, and as she left the shed’s shadow her shoulders did not ease. I watched her go and felt no comfort in the way the others fell into her hand again; it was the grip of someone willing to spend us dearly, and soon.

When she was gone, Holmes set out his arm. The gesture was spare, as if it were the only thing he had left to offer that carried no stain—bone and muscle, steady as timber. I took it, though my grip faltered; the rope marks burned hot beneath the sleeve, each pulse a reminder.

His hand closed with a measured weight, not tender, but practiced, the kind of support he had offered on countless marches and cases. For a heartbeat I almost leaned into it, tempted to let his steadiness carry me. But the cords returned to me—the rasp of hemp, the bite at the wrists—and the thought of yielding sent a bitter rush to my throat. I stiffened instead.

I caught the tightening of his jaw, the muscle working once before it stilled. The silence between us held sharp as a drawn blade, the falsehood we had agreed to humming against it like steel waiting to strike.

He did not speak. The pact lived in the air still, thin and cutting. I felt it press against me like another wound, unseen but tender to the touch.

Klara’s footsteps bled back into the murmur of the camp, and the silence closed on us like a fist. Beyond the palisade the sea sighed against the rocks, not gentle but ceaseless, a sound that promised no release.

Holmes turned toward the lean-to, that sagging shelter of boards pressed against the wall. I balked a step. It was from there Müller had dragged me into the dark, and the thought of returning set my heart hammering. The place stank of damp timber and old smoke; I could still taste cloth at my tongue.

Holmes paused, his gaze catching mine. He did not speak, but his arm came out once more, steady and deliberate, as though the offer itself could hold me to the present. I set my hand to it, more out of necessity than resolve, appreciating that he merely offered the anchor without force. In the end, remaining outdoors felt worse than our lean-to with the eyes, the whispers, the weight of suspicion that clung heavier than the sea air. Better the shadow of that ruin than the circle of firelight. So I went with him, each step feeling like a return to the snare, his arm the only tether keeping me from it.

Inside, Holmes lowered himself beside me, every movement careful, as if the boards might betray us. For a time we said nothing. The fire’s glow seeped through the cracks, voices rising and falling as Klara’s tale took root among the settlers. Here, apart, it was only our breath and the thin whistle of wind through the slats, though I could not shake the sense of eyes still pressed to us through the dark.

At last he rubbed his temple, smearing half-dried blood across his brow, and gave a short, weary laugh. “We speak of leaving as if it were trunks packed and hansoms ordered. Unless you have a boat hidden in your medical chest, the sea has us yet.”

I tried to answer in kind. “There will be a supply ship. There must. How else have they lingered here so long?”

He turned toward the horizon, where sea and sky blurred to one pale line. “A ship, yes—once, perhaps twice a year. Barter, scraps, a word carried. The storm that cast us here will have driven it off its course. And when it comes…” He let the thought fray, his eyes narrowing.

“When it comes?” I asked.

His gaze returned to me, sharp despite exhaustion. “Do you truly think they will let us aboard? Or will they keep us—physician and shadow both—the last coin to spend against the island’s hunger?”

The thought chilled me deeper than the air. I drew the blanket tighter, as if it could ward off more than cold. “Then we must find a way before that choice is made for us.”

“Precisely.” His reply was flat, final.

As I shifted, the blanket slid. Holmes’s hand shot out—cold, fingers trembling—and drew it back about my shoulders. He did not withdraw; the weight of his palm remained, steady through the thin cloth. It should have been a comfort. Instead it pricked me raw, as though every settler outside pressed their gaze into that small space between us. Müller’s words scraped at the back of my skull: Is this what makes him look at you in the dark?

“You should rest,” Holmes murmured. His voice was frayed but still possessed the authority of habit.

I faced him. The rope had scored his throat; the bruise at his jaw deepened under the pale bandage. My thumb rose almost of its own accord and brushed the tender line. His eyes closed at once, a small surrender, as if that touch steadied him more than speech.

The motion curdled inside me. The cords had not only marked my wrists—they had taught my body where danger lived. The memory returned: hemp slicing, hands forcing, the press of a stranger’s weight. I felt the old helplessness like bile and pulled my hand back to my knee. My fingers clenched the blanket’s edge until my knuckles whitened.

Holmes did not move away; he let his hold soften, not releasing but shifting to a careful support. The silence between us kept something unspoken, and I sat there with the blanket at my lap, attended to yet fenced off—safe, but not surrendered.

When his eyes opened again, they met mine unguarded—stripped of logic, raw with need.

“They will not let us go easily,” he said. “But I will not leave you here. That I swear.”

The words closed my throat. I forced out, “Nor I you,” though a tremor ran through me I could not hide. I pressed his hand more firmly to my shoulder as if to anchor us both, yet the touch burned with ambivalence—wanted, feared.

His gaze sharpened, catching the falter. His grip eased, not retreating, but softening as though afraid to deepen the hurt. “Watson,” he whispered. A pause, then the unfinished fracture: “What did he—” His restraint bit off the rest. He searched my face, the silence more eloquent than the question.

The his breath caught, and when he spoke it was almost a whisper. “He pressed a draught upon me. After that I was not myself. My limbs grew heavy, my mind clouded. There are hollows in the night I cannot fill.” His mouth hardened, the words spat like poison, though the shame in them lingered still.

He reached for me then, meaning only to steady the blanket, but his hand trembled so violently that for an instant I felt Müller’s grip again, hot and merciless. The revulsion came swift and unbidden. I forced myself not to flinch, though the effort left me hollow.

I could not meet his eyes. The stillness thickened between us until it felt breakable as glass.

He let it stand. We sat against the warped boards, salt on our lips, smoke in our lungs, the settlers’ voices seething just beyond the wall. No vows, no speeches. Only this: the fragile fact of being side by side, with silence too brittle to carry more.

The sea hissed beyond the palisade, insistent. Müller gone, Elise before him, the colony rotting behind its fence. His breath brushed close—steadying, suffocating.

“Watson,” he said at last, voice barely above the wind.

“Yes.”

A pause. Then: “No matter. It is enough you are here.”

The words pressed harder than any embrace. I shifted nearer, shoulder to his, careful not to jar the wound. He leaned without comment, but his weight felt strange now—both solace and burden.

At length his head tipped against my shoulder. At first I thought it weariness. Then his breath deepened, slowed. Sleep had claimed him.

I drew the blanket over us both and sat rigid, hand hovering at his brow before I let it settle. The bruise swelled darker, the bandage pale against his skin. His features softened in sleep. Mine stayed braced, the memory of restraint too sharp to loosen.

The slackness in his limbs, the way his pupils swam—these were not only from blows. Müller had dosed him. I saw it too late. That knowledge gnawed as fiercely as the rope burns at my wrists.

So I kept the watch—not for king or empire, not even for the camp whose hunger scraped the air—but for him. And all the while unease gnawed at me: whether the hand I held him with might falter when he woke, or whether the crowd outside would tear the choice from us first.

The circle did not hold. Once Klara’s voice thinned into silence, the settlers splintered into knots, muttering low and harsh. Greta clutched her children until they whimpered against her skirts. Hans barked at Ernst, his broad hands cutting the air while the carpenter’s jaw worked like a vise. Others only crouched by the fire, lips moving soundlessly—prayers, curses, bargains, it was impossible to tell.

Müller’s brother spat into the dirt and turned away, but not before his gaze raked over us—sharp, accusing, as though the lie already curdled on his tongue. A voice from the crowd, low but clear, carried after him: “The sea leaves no rope burns.”

Another answered, harsher still: “Nor does it cloud a man’s eyes.”

The words turned every head, not to the cliffs but to Holmes. He sat beside me, pale in the firelight, every motion dulled by the draught Müller had forced upon him. I felt the effort in him: the way his shoulders squared as though to summon composure, the way his hand stayed firm on my arm despite the tremor that betrayed him. Each attempt to claw back the sharpness I knew from him slipped like water through his grasp.

The settlers saw it too. Their eyes lingered, not with pity but with something nearer calculation, as if measuring how far his strength had waned and what use could be made of it. Their stares clung heavy, pressing through the thin cloth at my shoulder where his hand lay.

I wanted to shrug him off, to shake loose of the weight that recalled another man’s grip, harsher and merciless. Yet without it I felt myself adrift in the circle’s hostility, a stray cut loose in hostile water. So I endured it—clung to it, even—as the lesser of two poisons. His hand was no balm; it was only an anchor against the undertow of their eyes.

The quarrels rose and fell like surf, ragged and ceaseless, ready to break on any shore. Fear clung heavier than smoke; suspicion seeped into the very timbers.

At the fire, someone tipped out a pot and scraped the bottom with a wooden spoon. Only a thin sheen clung to the sides. The hollow clang it made cut through the quarrels, and for a moment all eyes followed the sound. Hunger spoke louder than grief.

Holmes said nothing. His gaze moved from knot to knot, weighing each, the tautness in him the same I had seen before cases tipped into violence.

“They will not forgive this,” I whispered.

He inclined his head the barest degree. “No. Nor will they endure long, with or without us. One man’s death will not mend the famine, nor silence the quarrels.”

The words pressed the air flat. There was nothing more to say.

The fire guttered, leaving their faces broken by shadow. The mutters sharpened, louder now, barbed. Some turned toward us, only to flinch when our eyes met—as though we carried contagion. Children stared openly, mouthing words they scarcely understood, their small voices repeating Müller’s spite like a rhyme learned too well.

A shiver ran through me that no blanket could warm. Müller was gone, but his poison lingered—in the ropes that burned my wrists, in the draught still dulling Holmes’s veins, in the whispers that gnawed at the camp like rats in the dark. The colony was already dying; the graveyard outside its walls would not be the last.

The sea hissed beyond the palisade, vast and pitiless, yet cleaner than the air we breathed here. Inside the walls hunger gnawed, lies curdled, and even the children’s mouths carried accusation. Whatever hope lay on the horizon, we would have to claim it soon—before the colony claimed us.

Chapter Text

We slipped away beneath the cover of night. The fire in the square had guttered to embers, the quarrels there dwindling into mutters, yet unease hung over the camp like smoke that refused to clear. Each creak of the palisade felt a summons, each step a betrayal waiting to be named.

Holmes walked at my side, slower than his wont, his sleeve brushing mine when the path narrowed. I flinched before I could master myself. He noticed—the flick of his eye betrayed it—but said nothing, only lengthened his stride to grant me space. The silence between us thickened all the more for it.

We turned not inland, where the huts pressed close and the watch might rouse, but down toward the shore. The sand was cold underfoot, the tide gnawed restlessly at the rocks, and the air stank of salt and rot. It carried me unwillingly back to that first morning after the storm, when we had stumbled from the Argus half-drowned, thinking the worst behind us.

Holmes paused once, glancing back toward the dim glow of the palisade. “They will wake soon,” he murmured, his voice ragged. “Best they believe us still among them.”

I nodded, though my throat ached with more than weariness. I could not endure the thought of that fire again, nor the eyes that measured our worth against their hunger. Better the ruin we had claimed than the company of those who would just as soon see us gone.

So we stole back to the strand, like shades to their own graves, and there set about the only task left to us: binding what Müller had torn, though not all of it bled where it could be seen. To that wreck we returned: crouched on the strand, half-swallowed by stone and surf, our first camp still lingering there in ruin.

The abandoned village lay as we had left it: huts sagging into themselves, doors wrenched from hinges, hearths long cold. A ghost of habitation, but no life. Smoke still drifted faintly from the settlers’ palisade above, while the sea hissed at the strand as though eager to claim even this desolation.

We found our old camp half-buried in shadow. The lean-to we had thrown against the wall still stood, though the wind had worried one side loose. Our belongings had been pawed over by brine and weather, yet a few remained — a dented tin, a coil of rope hardened to iron, the charred stones of a fire. Down the beach the Argus was little more than ribs now, half-swallowed in sand, her timbers picked clean by tide and scavenger both. I stared at her carcass and felt again that first staggering from the surf, how certain we had been the worst was behind us.

Yet the place had altered. Where once we had sheltered in haste, seabirds now nested in the rafters, their cries sharp above the surf. Wind had driven sand deep into the corners, swallowing what little we had left behind. It was ours still, but marked by absence, as though the island itself had been quick to reclaim what we had borrowed.

Holmes lowered himself onto a flat stone with more care than he wished to show, one hand pressed to the bandage at his temple. The wind tugged at his sleeve, lifted ash from the fire, and in its wake I heard how thin his breath had become.

“It will serve,” he said at last, though the words rasped, frayed with weariness.

I knelt beside him, fingers already at the knot of cloth. The bandage had stiffened into a crust, dark and brittle with old blood. When I peeled it free, it clung, and his teeth clenched against the sting. The wound beneath gaped angry and raw, a red furrow carved deep, rimmed by the salt and soot that had burned into it. I worried at how it was failing to heal properly after all this time.

The tin shook in my hands as I tipped it, water spilling warm down my wrist. My own pulse thudded against the metal. “Hold still,” I muttered, though it was my clumsiness that betrayed me.

His eyes caught mine at once, grey and searching. “Your hands shake,” he said softly, not accusation but fact.

I bit back the retort, and they trembled worse for the effort. Each touch of the rag drew fresh crimson to the surface, staining brighter where I had tried to wash it clean.

“Watson—”

The way he spoke my name struck deeper than the wound itself. It carried the question he dared not shape: what had Müller done, what poison had he set between us that made me flinch from him? The silence between syllables pressed sharp, demanding, but at length he let it fall. His lips closed tight, his jaw set against the asking.

I bent back over the task, throat raw, and pulled the bandage fast—tighter than I meant, binding as much as tending. “There,” I managed at last, hoarse with more than strain.

His hand came up, covering mine for an instant before I could withdraw. Not pressure, only presence—steady warmth offered as though he might still the tremor by lending me his stillness. For a moment I nearly let it rest there. Then he reached again, his long fingers deft despite the stiffness in his shoulder.

“Your hands,” he said, quiet but firm. “They require dressing, else they will fester.”

The words struck too close. I snatched my hands back at once, tucking them against my lap as though to hide the ruin. The skin was ridged and broken where the cords had cut, the new scabs fragile and already split, seeping with each beat of my pulse. They throbbed hot and raw, yet it was not pain that stayed me. I could not bear the thought of his touch upon them—not there, not yet.

“Watson, please. Let me—”

“No.” The word tore sharper than I intended, but once freed it could not be recalled. “Not those.”

He stilled, the strip of bandage he had retrieved dangling useless between his fingers. His eyes searched mine in the firelight, not reproachful, only grave. I braced for his insistence—for logic, persuasion, that relentless reasoning I had always trusted. But it did not come. At last he set the bandage aside.

“As you wish,” he said. His voice was steady, yet rougher at the edges than the words themselves.

The silence that followed pressed down heavy, thicker than the smoke curling from the hearth. I clenched my fists tight, knowing full well the sting it caused, the slow seep of blood against the scabs. Better that pain than the thought of another hand upon them. Better the wound unbound than the memory of his cords returned through any touch, even his.

I slept in fits, if it could be called sleep at all. The wind pressed through the gaps in the ruined wall, and each sigh of it seemed to stir the gag, the cords, the weight that had held me down. When at last I startled awake, my throat ached as though I had been choking still.

Holmes was beside me at once. I must have cried out, though I did not know it. His hand gripped my shoulder firmly, his other brushing against my arm, grounding me as if to anchor me in the present. His voice came low in the dark. “Easy, Watson. Only a dream.”

I recoiled before I could master myself, back striking the stone wall, breath breaking ragged. His hands fell away at once, leaving only the echo of their pressure. The look on his face in the glow of the dying fire was worse than the dream itself—hurt, yes, but quiet, patient, as though he had expected nothing else.

“I am sorry,” I rasped, though the words tasted hollow.

“You need not be.” He drew back a little, creating space between us, though I could see the effort it cost him not to close it again. “It will take time.”

Silence pressed in once more, heavy with things unspoken. The surf hissed tireless against the strand. I pulled the blanket tight around me, though no warmth seemed to reach the marrow of me. Holmes turned back to the embers. His profile was cut stark against the red glow, and for a moment he looked older than I had ever seen him. He did not touch me again that night.

By daylight the village looked no less forsaken. Roofs sagged, walls leaned askew, and the wreck of the Argus crouched on the strand, its ribs jutting like a carcass long picked. We scavenged what little could be put to use: driftwood half-dry, a shard of tin, a length of rope hardened by brine. It was enough to coax a fire, though it smoked and hissed more than it burned, stinging my eyes and throat with its acrid breath.

The rope rasped against my palms as I drew the lean-to taut. The salt in its fibres bit into the half-healed welts, and for an instant it was not rope but cord again—dragging at my wrists, cutting off my air. My breath caught sharp.

Holmes straightened from the fire as if he had heard the thought itself. His gaze fixed on me, weighing every twitch of my hands, every stagger of breath. I forced the knot fast, though my fingers near undid themselves. When I turned, his eyes were still on me, steady, unblinking, as though he had already begun to assemble the pattern of what Müller had wrought. I could not meet them.

He bent again to the kindling, his hands moving with mechanical precision. Now and then a tremor showed itself; I watched the way he stilled it by sheer act of will, as if mastery of body might grant mastery over circumstance. When the flame caught, he sat back at once, wary that his own strength might betray him further.

“Water next,” he said, without looking at me.

I nodded, setting about the task, though my limbs dragged like lead. Still I felt his eyes upon me—not on the work, but on me. Each time I stooped for wood, each time the rope scraped my palms, I knew he measured it as he would a footprint or an ash-mark, noting what I could not disguise. His silence carried more weight than words.

When at last we settled with the fire stuttering between us, he spoke. “It is not only the colony that is fraying.”

I looked up, startled. His eyes stayed on the flames, but the line of his jaw was set, the words clipped as though they cost him.

“I see it in you,” he went on, low and deliberate. “The recoil. The dreams.”

My mouth went dry. The rope burns throbbed against my fists, as though memory itself had teeth.

He turned then, and the grey of his gaze held no reproach—only pain, and the sort of patience that costs more than anger. “I would know what he did to you,” he said. His voice dipped softer. “You are my partner, and I care infinitely for you. But it is for that very reason I will not force you to speak.”

The sparks leapt, hissed, died. I bowed my head, the words gathering at my throat and scattering again before they could form.

Holmes let the silence stand. He fed another stick to the flames, his movements precise, as though tending the fire itself might be a way of tending me.

Toward noon I carried the battered tin down to the pool among the rocks where rain had gathered. The water was brackish, clouded with grit, yet better than none. I strained it through a rag and set it to boil over the fire. Holmes watched with a surgeon’s scrutiny, his eye following each step as though to assure himself I had not faltered. The thin hiss of the flame, the slow curl of steam, felt almost like order prised back from ruin.

The fish we had managed to catch fared worse. Charred at the edges, raw at the centre, it mocked the weeks we had survived as if we had learned nothing in them. Holmes regarded it with the same air he might have given to an inferior monograph, then tore free a strip with deliberate severity.

“Not quite the Argus’s galley,” he said at last.

The dryness of it startled me—an attempt at humour, thin but real. I found myself answering in kind, some quip about Mrs. Hudson’s cooking rising to my lips before I knew it. For a moment we might have been back at Baker Street, quibbling over a botched supper, the air hazy with pipe-smoke instead of ash. The moment passed quickly, fragile as the flame between us, but it lingered all the same.

We ate in silence after that, the taste of ash and grit caught in the water, yet it steadied me more than any food. For a brief span I felt almost human again—until I saw the tremor in Holmes’s hand as he set the tin aside, sharper for being plain in daylight, unshadowed by firelight or storm.

The fire had burned low by evening, a red eye glaring through the ash. We had eaten what little we could contrive and we sat in our makeshift campsite with nothing more to do but contemplate. Holmes sat opposite me, his appearance blurred by the smoke of the firepit, his long frame folded tight, eyes shadowed in the dim light.

As the light bled from the sky, I felt the weight of silence press heavier than hunger. It gnawed as keenly, yet gave no strength in return. Müller’s words had not only chained me, they had set a gulf between us that I did not know how to bridge. Each hour I held my tongue, the rift widened, until I feared it would swallow even what we had left.

The silence stretched until I could no longer bear it. “He—” My voice caught. I tried again, softer. “Müller...”

Holmes’s gaze lifted at once, sharpened even through exhaustion. He did not interrupt, though I could see the questions arraying themselves behind his eyes as surely as if he had spoken them aloud.

I twisted the ragged blanket in my hands. “He knew. He...” The rest failed me. My throat closed as though an unseen hand was forcing the gag back into my mouth, choking the breath from me.

His face scarcely changed, but I saw the flicker in his eyes—recognition, perhaps, or dread. “I guessed as much,” he said at last, very quietly. “When I saw you turn from me.”

The words cut, though not for their sharpness. It was the gentleness that undid me. “It was not you,” I managed, rough. “Never you.”

He leaned forward slightly, elbows braced on his knees, every line of him taut with the habit of inquiry. I could almost feel the questions trembling at the edge of his tongue, his very nature urging him to pursue, to uncover. Yet he held them back. His restraint was its own confession, and costlier than any demand would have been.

“I know,” he said at last. “Yet the shadow of it lingers between us.”

I bowed my head. The blanket slipped from my shoulders, but I had no strength to draw it back. For a long moment neither of us spoke, the hush filled only by the sea grinding tireless against the shore. 

At last he said, “Another time, when the words do not burn so hot. I can wait.”

There was pain in his patience, but I could not thank him for it. I only nodded once, and let the silence fall again. He picked up the blank from where it had fallen. I saw in his eyes a measure of uncertainty, whether he should arrange it around my shoulders or not. Finally, he spread it wide and handed it to me. I wrapped myself in it once more, feeling an unspoken chill pass between us.

Night gathered quickly. The fire had dwindled to embers, its glow a faint pulse in the ruined hearth. I sat with the blanket drawn high, listening to the sea grind against the shore and the rafters groan above us.

Holmes, having gone for a solitary walk while the light was still good, joined me without a word. He lowered himself carefully at my side, his movements slowed by pain. For a moment I thought he would keep his distance, as he had the night before. Instead he leaned close enough that his shoulder brushed mine—light, deliberate, and left to rest.

I almost drew away. The thought came swift as breath, the old recoil still quick within me. Yet the weight of his shoulder was steady, unthreatening, and I found I could let it remain. So we sat, softly pressed together against the warped wall, neither speaking. The silence still weighed between us, but it had changed its nature: no longer a wall but a shroud we bore together.

Beyond the ruins, the sea whispered and hissed, endless, implacable. Whatever words remained unsaid could wait. For that hour it was enough that we endured, side by side.

Chapter Text

The sea lay quiet at dawn, a long grey sheet, indifferent, broken only by the wreck’s ribs clawing up from the strand. We went down to the shallows with line and hook, our movements practiced now, if still clumsy. What had once been a desperate fight for every scrap had hardened into routine—meagre, but enough to keep us upright.

Holmes waded a pace ahead, careful of the stones. His arm still hung stiff at his side, and I saw the set of his jaw each time he shifted his weight. I said nothing—not from ease, but from the fear that words might undo the fragile balance between us. When the surf dragged sudden at his boots, I steadied him. He accepted the hand without comment, pride bitten back, and for a moment we moved as though the old ease between us had returned.

We cast our lines together, side by side in the wash. Holmes handled the task with the same precision he gave a case, even through the tremor that caught him now and then. My own efforts were slower, but between us we contrived something like skill, though always with the knowledge that one storm tide might strip it all away, as it had before.

We had learned, if not to live, then at least to endure: to coax fire from damp wood, to strain water through cloth already stiff with salt and ash, to keep ourselves breathing on what the sea begrudged us. It was no triumph, but a parody of order, enough to keep us clinging on. 

The surf whispered against the rocks, the tide drawn low. We waited, patient as the gulls circling above, until the lines pulled taut with a sluggish weight. Holmes hauled his catch with careful strength, the fish thrashing silver in the dawn. He handed it over without ceremony, and I slipped the hook free while he steadied the basket with his boot. The exchange was wordless, unhurried, almost familiar—an echo of a life too faint to last.

We cast again. The silence between us held, but it no longer pressed as before; it had thinned into something like a truce, fragile as the glassy water at our boots. I dared a glance at him then. His face was drawn, his sleeve soaked to the elbow, yet there was a steadiness in him I had not seen since before Müller’s hand had fallen between us.

It was as I turned back to the sea that I noticed a shape far off against the horizon. At first I thought it a cloud, a blur of white adrift on the grey. But it did not shift with the wind, nor thin with the light. I watched it longer, the line loose in my hands, until doubt stirred in me and my heart miscounted its beats.

“Holmes,” I said at last, low, uncertain. “Do you see it?”

He followed my gaze, his eyes narrowing, the old keenness flashing even through fatigue. Holmes said nothing at first. He only stood there, squinting into the haze, the line slack at his side. I could almost feel him measuring distance, canvas, wind, as though the facts might yield themselves whole from a speck on the horizon.

“It is no cloud,” he said at last, quiet but certain. “Nor gull. A sail.”

The word struck like a stone. For all our hunger and wounds, for all the nights crouched in ruin, the thought of rescue did not lift so much as it crushed, heavy in the chest. I saw it in Holmes as well—the flicker in his eyes, less triumph than calculation.

Neither of us moved to signal. The settlers, far inland behind their palisade, would see nothing from where they crouched. For the moment the knowledge was ours alone.

The fish lay forgotten in the basket. The tide pulled at what remained of our boots, tireless, but we did not cast again. We only stood together in the wash, watching that fragile wing of white creep larger against the grey, uncertain whether to hope or to brace.

I glanced once toward where I knew the palisade to be, half expecting Ritter’s voice to tear the air even before the smoke rose. But the jungle crouched dark and still, and the silence seemed to wait on us.

“We should raise a fire,” I said at last. The words fell heavy, as though speaking them made the choice irrevocable.

Holmes’s gaze flicked from the horizon to the driftwood piled above the strand. His lips pressed thin, but he nodded once. “They will see it inland.”

“Yes,” I said. “But they will see the ship soon enough. Better it be us than Ritter.”

We set to work without further word. My hands dragged the driftwood into a heap, Holmes stooping stiffly to strike flint. The sparks caught slow, sullen, before at last smoke coiled upward, dark against the sky. We fed the flame until it leapt, a column of fire tearing at the air, desperate to be seen. The heat bit at our faces as if the blaze would take us too, branding us before it summoned any aid.

The gulls wheeled and shrieked overhead. The surf hissed at our feet. I stood back from the blaze, my face hot, my pulse hammering harder than when Müller’s knife had pressed my throat. Relief warred with dread—the thought that salvation had been summoned, and that others might seize it first.

Holmes watched the smoke rise, his profile stark against the flame. “We have declared ourselves,” he murmured. “Now we must see what follows.”

For the first time in weeks, the thought came to me that we might leave this place alive. The relief of it struck so sharp that it startled me into motion before I could weigh it. I caught his face in my hands and pressed my mouth to his.

The kiss was clumsy, fierce with exhaustion—salt on his lips, ash in the air, my breath shaking with the force of it. For one unguarded moment I let myself believe we were spared. Holmes did not draw back. His hand rose as if to steady me, resting briefly at my jaw, and his breath shuddered warm against mine.

Then the moment passed. The blaze crackled, the gulls screamed overhead, and the enormity of what we had summoned pressed in upon me. My chest tightened with the knowledge that the settlers would soon see the smoke—that Ritter might even now be rousing his men.

I drew back, my heart hammering hard, memories rising. Holmes’s eyes were steady on mine, not reproachful, only searching. The silence between us returned, but it was changed, charged now with both promise and dread.

We fed the fire higher, the smoke climbing thick and black into the sky. I braced for the crash of feet from the palisade, Ritter’s voice splitting the air, desperate hands clawing at the driftwood. None came. The smoke writhed upward, unchallenged. Only the gulls cried over the surf.

Holmes studied the horizon, watching the ship carefully for any new movements, but I caught the flicker in his gaze when he spoke. “They will not come.”

“Why?” My voice rasped harsher than I intended.

“Because a ship brings more than rescue.” His mouth thinned. “It brings witness. And witness is what they fear.”

The words struck colder than the sea at my boots. Their absence weighed heavier than any rush of bodies. To stand exposed before strangers, to have their cruelties dragged into the light—that was the punishment they dreaded more than hunger. Better to let salvation pass than be hauled home in chains.

We stood alone beside the fire, the ship edging closer through the haze, and the silence of the colony pressed heavier than any shout. And yet I could not shake the sense of eyes upon us still, though no face showed at the treeline. Judgment pressed heavier from absence than it ever had from their presence.

The sail on the horizon grew until its lines were plain, the hull cutting through the swell with steady grace. At last the ship hove to beyond the breakers, white against the grey. A boat was lowered—oars flashing in rhythm, figures bent to the work.

I stood rooted. After months of scraping at driftwood, of gnawing stale crusts and choking on brackish water, the sight of men in uniform, clean and hale, struck me like a dream half-remembered. Their voices carried faintly over the surf—English voices, brisk and certain—as if the world we had left behind had come suddenly surging back, untainted by ruin.

The boat grounded on the sand with a crunch of wood against shingle. Two sailors leapt out, dragging it firm, their boots dark with spray. Another followed, a man in a lieutenant’s coat, his face shaded by a salt-stained cap.

Holmes stepped forward a pace, his long frame straight despite the stiffness of his wounds. His eyes never left the officer’s face, measuring every flicker of it.

The lieutenant looked between us, then at the fire roaring behind, and his brow furrowed. “God above,” he said. “We’d thought you lost.”

Holmes inclined his head, his voice steady though his bandage showed stark in the dawn. “The Argus foundered in a storm. Survivors made landfall here.”

The lieutenant’s gaze flicked from Holmes to me, then to the smoke still curling thick above the beach. “Survivors, plural?”

“Two,” Holmes allowed. “Not all.”

The officer’s jaw tightened, but he asked no more at once. He gestured to the sailors behind him, who had already begun scanning the shore with sharp, practical eyes. One bent to lift our meagre basket of fish, another nudged at the driftwood with his boot, as though these small trophies might speak for our weeks, nay, months, of endurance.

Shame flooded me sharper than salt. The lean-to sagging in the ruins, the salt-stiff rags on my back, the tremor still in my hands—all seemed mockery beside their hale strength. What we had contrived to keep breath in us looked suddenly like a parody of survival.

“You’ll come aboard,” the lieutenant said at last, decisive. “The Vigilant was dispatched when your ship’s loss was reported in Guayaquil. You’re fortunate to have held out this long.”

Holmes’s gaze drifted past him, out to the horizon where the ship lay waiting, its sails spread like wings. He said nothing, but the set of his mouth told me what I already knew: that rescue was never without cost, and witness could wound as keenly as hunger.

The lieutenant’s eyes narrowed. “You say ‘some survived.’ Where are they? Are there others?”

I felt Holmes’s gaze flick toward me, a silent warning to weigh my words.

“They are inland,” I said at last. “There is…a settlement of sorts.”

The officer looked to the huts sagging in the distance. “And they will not show themselves?”

Holmes’s tone was even. “They have made their choice.”

The lieutenant frowned, but did not press. Orders had brought him here, not curiosity. He turned back toward the surf, already motioning his men to ready the boat.

But I could not let it rest so easily. My throat tightened with the weight of it. I had sworn to heal, not abandon. To think of Elise’s children left in Ritter’s shadow—of Klara’s hand clutched at mine when her husband faltered—was to feel my oath corrode within me. Yet to share a deck again with Müller’s allies, to let them breathe the same air as Holmes while the memory of the gag still closed my throat—God help me, I could not.

Holmes must have read it in my face, for his hand brushed mine, light as the tide. “We cannot save those who refuse it,” he murmured. “Nor can you bind wounds that are not brought to you.”

The words steadied me, but did not absolve. Even as the sailors pulled the boat into the surf, I felt the absence behind us like a weight—the colony crouched unseen, neither saved nor condemned, their silence pressing heavier than any plea.

The lieutenant gave the order, and we were ushered into the boat. The sailors bent to the oars with the ease of men bred to it, their strokes rising and falling in perfect time. Each pull drew us nearer, each splash off their blades a reminder of strength we no longer possessed. The rhythm was as steady as a heartbeat, and it mocked the stumbling, halting months we had endured on shore. Spray leapt against the prow, cold on my face, and ahead the ship swelled larger, its sails vast and pale as wings.

Holmes’s jaw locked as the oars bit the water; each jolt of the prow seemed to drive deeper into his wounded side, though he gave no sound.

When at last we came alongside, the bulk of it rose sheer above us, black timbers gleaming with pitch, ropes humming in the wind. The bustle of deck and rigging thundered down—a world apart from the silence of the ruins.

A rope ladder was flung over the side. Holmes reached it first. He set his jaw and gripped hard, his bandaged hand white against the coarse rope. His long frame swayed with each heave, and I saw the tremor take him though he forced it still. He climbed like a man out of his own grave, inch by inch, until rough hands reached down and hauled him over the rail.

I followed. The first rung bit into my palms, the salt stinging raw places I had not known were cut. My arms shook beneath me. Twice my knee buckled, the world lurching as though the sea meant to drag me back. A voice above shouted encouragement, but it reached me dimly, muffled as through water.

At last a pair of arms closed around me, strong and certain, dragging me up the final span. I collapsed over the rail onto planks hard as stone, gasping at the smell of tar, pitch, canvas—sharp, alien scents of a world I thought I would never breathe again.

Holmes staggered down beside me. He was bent, breath thin, his bandage stark against the clean deck. Yet he straightened with effort, and for the first time in months we stood not on sand or ruin but on a deck that still lived.

We blinked about us like men newly wakened. The air struck sharp with tar and canvas, ropes thrummed overhead, gulls wheeled shrieking above the mast. Sailors crowded near, their voices brisk, astonished—Argus survivors, they said, their faces bright with a relief we could not yet mirror. Hands clapped my shoulder, pressed Holmes’s arm, as if we were trophies dredged from the deep.

The lieutenant’s voice cut across the din. “You’ll find you are not the first.”

The bustle faltered. He raised his voice, carrying over the press: “Two naturalists were taken up weeks past, clinging to a raft farther north. Passengers on your ship, as I understand it.They’d drifted onto the supply route and were spotted quick enough. They’ve been in port this month already, telling their tale.”

The words seemed to hang in the rigging, caught in the taut ropes above. The deck tilted under my feet, though the sea lay calm. I stared at the men around me—hale, ruddy, their uniforms crisp in the sun—and could not reconcile them with the ghosts we had become.

All this time we had thought ourselves the last—the only—and yet others had walked free long before, while we crouched among ruins and gnawed our silence raw.

Beside me Holmes was still. His mouth had tightened, but he gave no answer. Only his hand brushed mine, a fleeting contact, steadying where the world had shifted again beneath me. There was no envy in him, only a muted gladness that the boys had lived—he had liked them, for their vitality, for the quick light in their questions. I felt the same. Whatever cruelties the island had claimed, at least its youngest voices had not been silenced. It was a strange balm, to know that life had not been spent entirely upon that cursed shore.

Around us the sailors moved briskly on, ropes slapping taut, orders ringing down from the quarterdeck. The Vigilant lived and breathed beneath our feet, but behind us the colony lay silent, hidden now by smoke and distance, like a nightmare already half-dissolved by morning light.

Behind us, the wreck’s ribs were swallowed in the haze, as though the sea itself meant to conceal what had been done there.

Chapter Text

Sleep did not come, though clean canvas stretched above and the ship’s roll was steady as breath. The berth was narrow yet intact, its boards dry, its blanket scratchy with newness. On the small table waited a crust of bread and a tin mug of water so clear it caught the lamplight like glass. Such things should have soothed me, but after untold weeks of smoke and rot they felt uncanny, conjured from dream rather than sea-store. Comfort unsettled me more keenly than ruin.

By daylight the lieutenant pressed us up to the deck. Tar and brine stung the air; ropes thrummed like struck strings; gulls wheeled and screamed about the mast. Men shouted orders, boots clattered sure against the planks, lines hissed as they paid out. The noise was a storm in itself. My limbs locked, my ears raw with the sudden glut of sound. After so long with whispers and silence, the life of a ship struck like cannon-fire.

A sailor brushed my shoulder in passing—meant as kindness, no doubt—but I jolted as though from a blow. Holmes caught it at once. He said nothing, only turned me back toward the hatch, his hand light at my elbow.

From aft came a burst of laughter, rough and careless, the kind of sound I had near forgotten. It rang too brightly in my skull, sharper than any reprimand. Those men had no thought of graves or hunger. Their world was the sea and the rhythm of its work, unbroken by ghosts.

I ran my palm along the board at my side, half-expecting it to sag damp or crumble beneath my touch. It held firm, too clean, too dry. The water in the mug tasted sharp, almost metallic in its purity. Even the coarse weave of the blanket rasped like new cloth not yet worn to human shape. I felt stranger beneath these proofs of order than I ever had among ruin. The ship breathed around me, its timbers humming with life, and I mistrusted it as one mistrusts a kindness long withheld.

Below, the world shrank again: lamplight dim, timbers sighing with each swell, the berth pressing close on every side. Holmes lay opposite, his wounded arm braced against his chest, breath thin but even. The bandage at his temple showed pale as bone, darkened at the edge where it had bled afresh. He had borne himself upright above, but the strain had carved hollows in his face, the kind I had once seen only after nights without rest.

Then he shifted, a faint catch of breath betraying him, and then pushed himself upright. The effort seemed to draw against every joint. He paused halfway, shoulders taut, before levering himself to his feet. The crossing between bunks was no more than three steps, yet he moved as if it were a deck pitched high in storm. His hand trailed the wall for balance, fingers spread against the rough boards as though he would anchor himself to the ship’s frame.

I caught the flicker at his jaw, the tightening he showed when pain lanced sharp, and the faint tremor in his stance when he straightened fully. The sight struck me harder than any wound of my own: that his body, so long an instrument of precision, now betrayed him inch by inch.

Yet he gave no word to the hurt. He stood a moment, composed, only the shallow rise of his breath and the shadow at his temple betraying what it cost him. When at last his gaze came to me, it was steady, unreadable, but I knew the toll was carved into every line of him.

“Give me your hands,” he said quietly.

The words struck sharper than command. I drew them back to my chest before thought could catch me.

“No.” The denial rasped raw. The thought of him seeing the torn flesh, the rope-burned welts, chilled me deeper than any knife. My fingers locked tight, as though a clenched fist could guard the shame.

His gaze did not shift. Shadow rimmed his eyes, but there was no yielding in them. “Do you think I would shrink from them? That I could mistake your hurt for weakness?” His voice was low, worn at the edges. He let the silence stand until it seemed the timbers themselves held breath. Then softer still: “There is nothing in you he could twist that I would not know as my own.”

The protest faltered on my tongue. My fists loosened by slow degrees, tremors running through them not only from pain. At last I set them out on my lap, reluctant, unsteady. His hands closed around mine—not to seize, but to steady them against my own recoil.

He turned them palm-up. The skin was raw, the cuts reopened by salt and use, flesh ragged where cord had rasped. I wanted to snatch them back, to hide the filth of what had been done, but his hold was steady, unjudging. His touch was gentle, precise as he smoothed salve across the welts and wrapped them in strips of clean cloth from a sailor’s kit. My breath hitched each time his fingers traced too close to the worst of the wounds, but he worked as if the flinches did not deter him, as though tending me were his right. His long fingers remained steady, yet once I felt them tremble—not with weakness, but with something tightly leashed.

“Steady,” he murmured once, barely more than breath. When I flinched again, sharper, he said, “Only a moment.” The words were not coaxing, not command—only plain assurance, given as fact.

When my hands were bound he did not release me at once. His gaze searched the rest of me, and with quiet deliberation he reached for the laceration at my cheek where the gag had torn the skin. I turned my head instinctively, heat rising with the shame, but he waited until the resistance ebbed, then touched the split with the edge of his thumb—so lightly it was more air than contact—before dabbing it with cloth steeped in spirit. The sting drew water to my eyes; I swallowed it down, unwilling to give sound to the pain. He said nothing, only worked with a surgeon’s care.

“Good man,” he whispered, almost to himself, as he pressed the clean strip into place.

He found the swelling at my ribs where boots had struck, the dark weal along my shoulder, and bound them as best he could with the scant supplies to hand. Each touch made me draw breath sharp, each strip of cloth another reminder of the blows that had left their mark. Yet his hands did not falter. Never lingering for his own sake, never hurried either.

At last his hand moved lower, intent on further hurt I could not bring myself to name. Shame surged hot through me; my breath caught sharp.

“No more,” I said, harsher than I meant. My hand closed over his wrist, holding him still. “Please. That is enough.”

For a moment he did not move. His eyes lifted to mine—steady, unreadable—but something in them eased. He gave the barest nod, and drew back without protest. When he set the last strip of cloth, he paused a moment, his hands still upon me, as though unwilling to trust the work to hold unless he bore the weight himself.

The hush deepened between us until it seemed even the timbers stilled to listen. Above, a burst of laughter rang sudden and careless, a sailor’s mirth breaking through the boards. The sound cut sharp through the quiet, then faded, leaving only the creak of rope. I parted my lips, thought to speak, but no words came. Holmes’s hand lingered an instant longer, then drew back, and the chance dissolved with it.

The ship groaned softly around us. Timbers creaked with the swell, a rhythm too steady to threaten. For the first time in many nights the hush did not weigh as menace, but as pause.

Holmes eased back onto his bunk, breath catching with the effort. The lamplight traced the hollows beneath his eyes, sharp planes thrown into relief by fatigue. Above, boots rang briskly on the deck, ropes strained, voices rose and fell in easy cadence. The life of the ship moved on, distant as if heard through glass.

“They keep time as though the sea itself bent to their order,” Holmes murmured.

I flexed my bandaged hands, testing the stiffness of the cloth. His touch lingered there, not unwelcome, though it caught my breath uneven—poised between gratitude and some sharper thing. A faint sound escaped me, half assent, half wonder. “It seems a world away.”

His eyes flicked toward me, searching, but he asked no further. He leaned back against the wall, head tipped in weariness, and closed his eyes. The lantern swayed on its hook, the ship shifted, and I let the hush gather between us—dense, as though the world itself held breath.

The flame guttered low, throwing the planks into restless shadow. Holmes turned onto his side, long frame curled awkwardly to fit the narrow bunk. I lay opposite, boards pressing hard against my shoulder, listening to the slow heartbeat of the ship in its timbers.

Neither of us reached to snuff the lamp. The space between our bunks was scarcely an arm’s span. I could have crossed it with ease, yet the thought alone set my chest taut.

At last Holmes lifted a hand, slow, deliberate, and placed it palm-up on the narrow strip of floor between us. He did not look at me.

I stared at it for a long moment, the light catching on his knuckles, the fingers still, waiting. My pulse hammered in my throat. At last my own hand slipped down, awkward, halting, until my fingertips brushed his.

His fingers curled lightly round mine—no more than presence, no pressure to bind. The warmth of it spread through me, unfamiliar in its gentleness, and struck deeper for that.

We lay so in silence, not daring more. The ship rocked gently, voices thinned to murmurs above, and still sleep circled warily, as though mistrustful of us. The hush pressed close—not peace, but a lull before something heavier.

The lantern swung with the roll, its light cleaving the planks in quick, knife-like strokes. Each flash cut the dark too sharply, then withdrew, leaving shadows that seemed to gather substance of their own. The timbers groaned with every swell, not as wood but as rope drawn tight, cords biting into flesh remembered too well.

My breath caught. For an instant I saw the shadows knot and shift into form, the swing of light across the boards shaping a figure at the edge of sight. Müller’s outline flickered there, the gleam of a knife glancing bright before the dark consumed it again.

The lantern swung, light slashing across the planks in quick strokes. For an instant the shadow on the wall bent into a familiar outline—the jut of shoulder, the gleam of steel. I blinked hard, yet the figure thickened in the shifting dark, as if drawn up from the wood itself. The timbers groaned like rope under strain, and in the next moment the cabin was gone, and I was bound once more.

I shut my eyes, but the image clung like smoke—sharp, sour, inescapable.

I must have slept, for when the nightmare came it came without warning. The cabin dissolved, and I was bound again—cords rasping raw, gag biting deep, the air thick with smoke and sweat. Müller’s shadow loomed close, knife gleaming in slats of moonlight.

“You wallow like a beast,” he whispered, voice a caress edged with scorn. His fingers traced the cords, tightening until my breath hitched. Drool ran at my chin, my shoulders twitched helplessly. “Is this what he cherishes? What keeps him at your side?”

I tried to speak. The gag forced the words back until I choked on them. His face blurred, then sharpened, eyes alight with hunger.He pressed close, lips brushing my ear.

“Perhaps I should make him watch.”

The cry tore from me and flung me waking. The cabin spun. My throat ached as though the gag still cut it. My wrists burned phantom-hot beneath the fresh bandages Holmes had tied. I thrashed once, struck the bunk-frame, until a hand caught at my shoulder.

“Easy, John.” The word cut through the fog more surely than command. His hand held my arm, firm but steady, not to trap me but to keep me tethered. In the faint lamp-glow I saw his face drawn tight, the worry stark. My name steadied me more than his grip.

Even so, I flinched. The bunk’s edge bit into my spine, breath sharp in my chest. For a long moment I could not speak; the air still carried the nightmare.

When at last I managed to speak, the words came broken, halting, like stones dragged up from deep water. My eyes set upon a crack in the floorboards, staring at it as though it was an anchor that would prevent me from falling away.

I spoke of everything. The taking. The torture. The taunts. The assault. He listened without a flicker, his stillness the only answer. I feared it, that stillness. Feared what it might conceal: judgment, or worse, pity. Yet he only watched, his hand resting open between us, patient.

I forced the words out at last, brittle, each one catching at my throat. “He wronged me. In a manner I cannot easily name. A manner meant to divide us. To make you see me less, and turn from me for it.”

The silence that followed was thick as stone. I could not lift my eyes.

Holmes leaned forward, his voice low but certain. “There is nothing he could do to set us apart. Nothing. Müller sought only to plant rot where he could not prevail. He cannot unmake what is ours.”

As he spoke he shifted forward, the bunk’s boards creaking under his weight. The lamplight touched his face, showing lines carved deep with strain, and the nearness of him undid me more than his words. I could not bear it—his closeness, his steadiness. I dropped my gaze, hands clutching the blanket until my fingers burned.

The words should have comforted, and some part of me knew they did. Yet my chest heaved as though they had broken something open instead.

I lowered my hands slowly. He had set his own palm open between us—quiet, patient, not demanding. I crushed the blanket hard, the wool biting my fingers.

“I was bound as though for slaughter,” I whispered at last. “He said I would be left hollow… that you would turn from what remained.” The words left me raw, half-choked, as though even naming them gave them strength.

Above, boots struck the deck, timbers groaned with the sea. I braced for pity, or distance.

Instead Holmes leaned nearer, his voice rough but steady. “You are not hollow. You never will be. Nothing he did could make me turn from you.”

There was hardness in him, yes, but also something softer, and it undid me more than pity ever could. For a breath neither of us moved. Then he reached, slow and deliberate, and set his hand palm-up on the boards.

When my voice failed and I sat unable to move, to take the hand that was offered,, something in him gave way. In a breath he had crossed the gap to sit next to me on my bunk, his hands on mine. Not gentle at first—fierce, as though he could anchor me by force of will alone. The blanket tangled between us; the lamp swung and threw wild light across his face.

“Nothing he did could make me turn from you," he said again as though he was afraid I had not heard him, his voice raw as rope.

It startled me, yet I stayed. His grip steadied, eased. His thumb traced slow circles across my wrist, as if to wipe away the cords’ memory. He bent his head until his brow rested against my temple, and I felt his breath uneven with mine.

His arm slid round me, tentative, then firmer when I did not recoil. My cheek found his shoulder. The knot in me loosened by slow degrees, like a rope uncoiling at last. His warmth pressed steady. Presence, not proof.

We stayed that way, ship creaking around us, lantern swaying with the roll. The silence that wrapped us was no longer a weight but a cover I could rest beneath.

Somewhere below deck a laugh rose sudden, light and feminine, so out of place my heart stilled. It was gone at once, swallowed by the groan of timbers, and I told myself it was only some sailor’s jest warped by distance. Yet the sound clung like smoke, and for a moment I thought of Elise—of voices cut short, and how the dead sometimes follow more closely than the living.

My cheek found his shoulder, his breath stirred my hair, and the knot inside me loosened—fraction by fraction, but real. The quiet lingered, no longer a weight but a mantle I could rest beneath. He pulled me ever so gently down onto the bed and we lay together, feeling the rock of the ship, feeling the closeness of the other's hands on our bodies.

For a long time I lay still, listening to the timbers sigh with the sea, the distant voices of sailors above. Ordinary sounds, once forgotten, seemed unearthly now, like echoes of another life. The creak of rope, the flap of sail, the measured tread of boots—each a reminder we were carried forward, not left behind.

His arm held firm, his breath steady at last, and though the old fear flickered once, sharp and quick, it passed. I did not flinch. The warmth of him anchored me more surely than the keel itself.

Yet even in that hush, London felt impossibly far—its lamps and pavements dreamlike compared to the island’s ruin. I could not know if Baker Street still waited for us, or if what returned would be strangers to that life.

The scars would not fade quickly; Müller’s shadow would rise again. But in that hour I felt what I had not dared since the storm took the Argus: the hush of safety. Fragile, imperfect, but ours.

My eyes closed at last, not in exhaustion but in rest. The ship bore us onward into the dark—and as the lantern guttered low, I thought the boards groaned like a rope drawn taut, as though somewhere the island still had hold of us.

Chapter Text

The voyage home blurred into a haze of grey sea and darker thought. The Vigilant drove forward with the indifference of a machine, while each day for me was another reckoning with silence—not the silence of ruin, but of memory, which corroded no less. Holmes bent his strength to the ship’s log, his pen scratching a rhythm as tireless as the waves. Order was his defence, but I saw its cost in the stiffness of his shoulder and the hollows beneath his eyes when he thought me unwatchful. The page steadied him, but gave no ease.

At last the Thames took us in, its waters black with coal-smoke and refuse. The clamour of the docks struck like cannon-fire: stevedores bawling, steam shrieking, rigging groaning overhead. After months of surf and silence, the press of London was unbearable. I clutched the hansom rail as we jolted from the quay, every hoofbeat rattling through my bones.

Fog lay heavy in the streets, thick with soot and gaslight. Faces hurried past—clerks, porters, women with baskets—but their haste seemed grotesque after want. Their voices rang too loud, too eager, as if plenty itself had grown monstrous. London pressed close like a wilderness of another order, its abundance no less strange than the island’s famine.

Only when Baker Street loomed did the knot in me slacken. The soot-darkened brick, the brass at the bell, the familiar steps—all stood as they had, yet seemed altered, as though we returned not as men but as shades. Mrs. Hudson had laid a fire, its glow steady in the grate; the faint trace of tobacco clung still about the mantel. Holmes sank into his chair as if exile had been a dream, yet the lamplight betrayed the pallor of his face, the pale bandage at his temple.

I took my seat opposite. The room was unchanged, but it seemed to hold our absence like a shadow, and the journey behind us pressed close, unwilling to release its claim.

Mrs. Hudson near wrung her hands at the sight of us, though she masked it in bustle. Fresh linen appeared, my extra medical bag from beside my bed, and steaming tea set before I could speak. She clucked at my bandages, at the remnants of Holmes' sling. Her ordinary scolding unsettled me more than silence had—the world resuming its shape while ruin still clung to us.

Holmes endured her fussing with the forbearance of an old convalescent, though I saw the tightness of his jaw when she tugged at his coat. He submitted without word, letting her dab and murmur as though he were a truant schoolboy. At last she fetched a basin and clean cloths, setting them firmly beside us before retreating to the hearth, where she busied herself with the fire and pretended not to watch.

He made to lift his hand, then faltered, his shoulder betraying him. For an instant he looked as if to wave me off, but instead let it fall. The surrender was wordless, and it bound me more than any plea.

The bandage at his temple had slipped loose in travel. I unwound it carefully, my fingers remembering too well the salt-stiff cloth I had once peeled away in ruin. The wound itself was smaller now, edged pink with healing, yet in the lamplight it weighed heavier than ever. Holmes met my gaze once, his grey eyes steady, then closed them as I bound it fresh. For that span he yielded wholly into my hands, and I felt the weight of that trust more keenly than the cloth I wound.

When I had finished, he turned his hand within mine. “Yours next,” he murmured.

I let him strip the wrappings from my palms, the air cold against raw flesh. His touch was deft, but not detached. His thumb lingered a moment too long at the curve of my hand, as if to steady me as much as the bandage. He worked with precision, every motion exact, the bite of antiseptic sharper than salt. Each brush of his fingers was comfort and reminder both: that even here, with Mrs. Hudson rustling at the grate and the house settling around us, we were still stitching ourselves back from ruin.

I watched his face as he bent to the work—the furrow of concentration, the tremor in his lashes when my breath caught at the sting. He did not pull away, nor did I. The silence between us no longer gaped like a gulf, but lay narrow and precarious, a bridge that might yet bear weight if we trusted it enough.

The fire crackled low, the mantel clock ticked its merciless rhythm, and outside cab-wheels rattled heedless over Baker Street stones. Within these rooms the world had resumed its shape, as though nothing had broken. Yet in the steady clasp of his hands upon mine, I knew all had been altered—and that the work of mending was not mine alone to carry.

At last Mrs. Hudson rose, satisfied by what she saw. She gave a small, brisk nod—as though our tending of one another were no stranger than her fussing—and withdrew, leaving the quiet behind her. The hush seemed almost deliberate, as though the walls themselves listened. Only the tick of the clock and the faint hiss of the fire remained—small, stubborn sounds that filled the room like breath after a long held silence. Holmes stretched long in his chair, one arm folded across his chest, the other cradling a pipe he did not light. The lamplight carved hollows under his eyes, turning his pallor stark against the dark upholstery. I sat opposite, clutching my hot water bottle to my shoulder.

London murmured beyond the windows: carriage wheels clattering over cobbles, a bell tolling somewhere through the fog, the faint bark of a hawker’s cry. Yet those noises felt distant, muffled as if by glass, unreal compared to the closeness here. Within these walls the air had thickened, weighted not with smoke but with all we had not spoken. It was a silence of another order than the island’s—not born of fear, yet pressing with equal force, as though the house itself demanded its due.

Holmes’s gaze flicked to me then, sharp even through weariness. “Watson,” he said softly.

My name broke the stillness like a drop into still water. In the way he spoke it I heard the turn—not of wound or bandage, but of memory: Kappel’s fall, Müller’s whisper, Ritter’s hollow reign. The colony had not followed us across the sea, yet its shadow had crossed the threshold with us and settled now in the quiet, as real and present as the fire’s glow.

That evening, when the house had stilled and Mrs. Hudson’s bustle was behind us, we made ourselves human again. The basin steamed with clean water; salt and grime were scrubbed away, wounds bound fresh. Supper followed—bread, broth, and tea—and though it was plain, the richness of it after such privation sat almost heavy in the mouth. We ate slowly, each bite both solace and reminder of what had been denied us.

When the table was cleared and the stairs creaked under Mrs. Hudson’s retreat, the silence deepened. Not the taut silence of the island, sharpened by want, but one no less oppressive. The fire hissed as it settled in the grate, the clock ticked its steady measure, the smell of tobacco clung faint in the air.

Holmes set his pipe aside and leaned forward, elbows to his knees. The firelight carved hollows into his face, every line stark. “You should not have borne it alone,” he said at last. His voice was low, stripped of argument—more confession than rebuke.

I stared into the china cup cooling in my hands, absurd in its delicacy after months of tin and driftwood. “If I spoke it, it would become real. As though silence might still smother it.”

His gaze did not waver. “Müller thrived on silence. He used it as a chain. Elise paid that price when her love for him soured. Kappel paid it when his laughter threatened to free her. Klara saw it. They all did. Yet none dared name it aloud.” His jaw tightened. “To endure is not to heal. And to be silent is not to be spared.”

The truth of it bit deep. I let it settle before I met his eyes again. “And still... did we err in leaving them? Elise’s children. Klara—”

Holmes leaned back, steepling his fingers. The gesture, so familiar in these rooms, seemed almost foreign after exile, as though reason itself had to relearn its place. “Our error was only this: to believe such a place could be mended by our hands. It was no colony, Watson, but a fever. Elise’s death was its spark, Kappel’s the breaking point.”

My throat tightened. “And you believe Müller struck the blow.”

Holmes’s face hardened in the firelight. “There is no doubt. Jealousy drove him, and fear bound the rest. The camp knew it. That was why the rations passed in silence the next morning. They knew, and bent their heads all the same.”

The bread sat heavy in my stomach, resisting comfort. “And we—knowing—still left them.”

His eyes glinted, sharp even through weariness. “Had we stayed, Watson, we would have joined him in an unmarked grave. Müller had the rope in his hand and Ritter the hunger at his back. You recall how close they came to you. To us both. Another week, another quarrel, and the earth itself would have taken us down with them.”

I clenched my bandaged hands together. “And Klara?”

His gaze softened, though faintly. “She held what line she could. Bought moments of decency, but she could not breathe life into what Müller had poisoned. Even she could not.”

The fire cracked sharp as a musket-shot. I set the cup aside, my throat too dry to swallow. “So we turned away from children, from women beaten down. A supply ship may yet find them, but we—”

“We lived,” Holmes cut in quietly. “We gave what we could. But we are not arbiters of their fate. To drag them back would have been only to carry their graves into another land. And you...” His eyes fixed on mine. “You are no less a physician for refusing to bleed beside them.”

The fire’s warmth thinned against the chill memory laid over me. Smoke clawed in the grate, and in it I saw the strand once more—sagging huts, Elise’s cough, Müller’s whisper, the children’s thin cries.

Holmes reached across the small table, laying his hand light upon mine. His palm was warm, steady, grounding. “They are beyond us now,” he said. “But you are not beyond me. Nor I beyond you.”

The words fell heavy, but not crushing. Around us the house breathed its quiet rhythms—fire, clock, the distant rattle of wheels. The fever of that place lay behind. What remained was here: warmth, silence, and the man who would not let silence have the last word.

The fire had burned low, the room steeped in shadows. Clean linen pulled taut across the narrow bed smelled faintly of soap—so sharp it stung the memory of brine from my nose.

Holmes stood at the window, erect but weary, the fog beyond catching in the lamplight. He seemed both of the house and apart from it, as though London itself might yet reject us as intruders. His hands were clasped behind his back, but the set of his shoulders betrayed fatigue he would not confess.

For a moment I only watched him, the quiet between us thick with all that had not been spoken. I felt again the weight of the sea, the hush of the colony, the nights when silence punished more than it protected. Here, I wished to give it another name.

“Come to bed,” I said at last. The words felt almost absurd in their plainness, yet they were mine again, unshaken.

He turned at once. His eyes searched me, keen even through weariness, and wary still. The wariness pricked, but I could not resent it; it was truth.

Crossing the room, I set my hand to his sleeve. The cloth was cool beneath my fingers, and he went still at the touch. For a breath we remained so, the hush taut between us, then I drew his face down to mine, my fingers tangling in his hair.

The kiss was unhurried, deliberate—his lips parting not in demand but in answer. For a time we only stood, close enough to feel the heat of one another, the fog outside forgotten.

Piece by piece, we shed the remnants of our physical ordeal. His coat slid from his shoulders with a faint rasp, and starvation’s mark showed plain: the narrowness of his chest, the hollows beneath his collarbones. The bandage at his temple caught the lamplight, stark as a wound remembered. When I unfastened his shirt, he let it fall open without protest, his eyes steady on me, waiting to see if I could bear what was revealed. In that moment, I saw in his face the hurt we had both endured.

Scars livid across his shoulder and side told their tale in silence. My throat tightened—not only with desire, but with the ache of knowing how near I had come to losing him. I laid my hand to his chest, feeling bone, flesh, breath—proof that he endured. His own breath shivered at my touch, and I felt the tremor echo through us both. I moved my lips to his neck, pressing one kiss at a time down the length of his collarbone. A soft moan escaped his lips.

We drew together until our skin met. The warmth startled after so many weeks of chill, and for a long moment we only held—my cheek pressed to the scar at his shoulder, his palm anchoring me at the ribs, the beat of his heart steady under my hand.

When at last we parted, it was only to move, wordless, toward the adjoining room. Holmes’s door stood open, the familiar shadows of his room stretching across the floor. He paused on the threshold, as though testing whether exile would follow us even here. Then he stepped within, drawing me with him.

The bed was narrow, its coverlet neat as ever, but in the lamplight it seemed a different country than the rooms we had reclaimed downstairs. Here there was no pretense of habit, no armour of tea or firelight—only the unspoken question of whether we might inhabit this space together again. I set my hand at the small of his back, guiding him forward until the stillness between us broke. I fumbled with his belt, pulling it away, unbuttoning his trousers. His breath caught and his palms came to rest squarely on my chest.

Then his hand slipped lower, and a flash struck me: Müller’s breath, the ropes, his rasping voice. The bed wavered into a strand of ruin, the sheets cords at my wrists. I gasped, caught between passion and memory.

Holmes stilled at once. He did not retreat, but he did not press. Only his voice, low and steady: “As you will, Watson. There is no haste.”

The words steadied me. Slowly the ghost thinned, bitterness receding beneath the weight of his presence. His hand remained—warm, patient, waiting—until I turned to him again, and fear loosened its hold.

His breath caught at my mouth, a tremor that mirrored my own. I pressed closer, cautious at first, then bolder as he yielded. His arms closed around me with firmness that steadied, drawing me into the circle of his strength. My hand traced the lean planes hunger had left, lingering over each scar as though to reclaim it. When I brushed the long seam at his side, he flinched but caught my wrist and held it there, his gaze unwavering, granting permission. Trust passed between us as surely as touch.

He pulled me onto the bed and I followed willingly. A sound escaped me—half moan, half breath—and for a heartbeat he froze, fearing hurt, fearing another memory. I answered with a kiss that carried no hesitation, pulling him close, claiming him not as possession but as proof that we belonged still to one another.

The air grew close, yet no shadow clung to it. No cord, no gag, no echo of the colony. Only the rasp of stubble at my cheek, the clean sting of soap on skin, the steady thrum of his heart beneath my palm. Even the creak of the frame and the whisper of the sheets became part of it—the ordinary strangeness of two men relearning how to hold each other in a bed that smelled of home.

Passion built quiet and sure, unhurried but insistent. Each breath, each shift, was question and answer, weaving us together where silence had once tried to part us. My hands mapped the lines of him—jaw, collarbone, ribs—while his fingers threaded into my hair, lingered at my wrists, steadied at my hip. Nothing claimed, yet everything given.

When at last we stilled, we did not fall apart but folded closer, unwilling to risk even an inch of space. His arm lay heavy across my back, mine curved around his ribs, our legs tangled until I could not tell where one ended. The heat of his skin sank into mine, deeper than firelight, carrying the astonishment of being alive together in that narrow bed.

The hush shifted, no longer an enemy but a shelter. The fire whispered low, the clock kept its rhythm, and beyond the window London moved indifferent through the fog. Here, within these walls, there was only breath, closeness, and the slow return of ease.

So we lay at last, not spent with exhaustion but eased. I pressed my face into the hollow of his shoulder, and his breath stirred my hair in answer. For the first time since the island, I closed my eyes—not in vigilance, but in trust.

I write these last lines by the fire at Baker Street, the lamplight steady on the page, the familiar clock marking the hours above. Outside, London clamours on—hooves on cobbles, bells muffled in the fog—indifferent as the sea itself. Within these walls, all appears as it was: Holmes in his chair, his pipe idle at hand, the faint trace of tobacco hanging in the air. And yet nothing here is untouched.

The island clings still—in dream, in silence, in the ghost of cord about my wrists. I know it will return unbidden, as Müller’s voice already does: the hiss at my ear, the promise to hollow me out. Such things are not undone.

But neither is what followed. That I endured, that Holmes endured with me—that in the end we lay side by side, not as prey and witness but as men who chose one another still. Last night, in the narrow bed, I felt the sheets cool beneath us, smelled the sharp soap of fresh linen mingling with the smoke from the hearth. I traced the bones hunger had left in him; he touched the scars rope had left in me. In those small acts of recognition, passion returned—not the desperate flame of the strand, but a steadier fire, one that warmed rather than consumed. I fell asleep to the cadence of his breathing beside me, and woke to find it unchanged.

The shadow is not gone. It will return—in memory, in dream, in silence pressing too close. Yet it no longer divides us. If anything, it binds us in the knowledge of what we have survived.

I do not set this down for publication. It is no case to be numbered among his triumphs, no tale to be told at clubs. I write so that the silence does not remain mine alone, so that one day truth may outlast the ghosts.

If the sea taught us anything, it is that survival is not conquest but persistence. And so I close this account not in victory, but in what endures: two men, a fire, clean linen on a narrow bed, and the hush of a room returned to us. For now, that is enough.