Salt.
Seaweed. Tar. Damp wood. The stink of it filled Jack's lungs before he had a thought to put around it. The floor under him moved—no, rolled—and the boards groaned like an old animal.
He blinked at a lantern swaying from the ceiling. Its light dragged long shadows across nailed-up charts and coils of rope and a cutlass hung on two iron pegs. The air was wet enough to taste.
This wasn't his room.
This wasn't a hospital.
He tried to speak and coughed instead. The sound came back to him in the small cabin—thin, wrong.
And then the memory bit down.
"History? Pirates? That's your future?" his father had said, not shouting, which somehow made it worse.
"Why can't you understand?" Jack had yelled, voice cracking. "It's who I am. It's what I want."
His mother had rubbed the bridge of her nose like she was fighting a headache that was his whole existence. "Jack… you'll regret this."
Door slam. Cold air. Breath fogging. Headlights rushing at him, far faster than there was time to think about. White. A sound like the world snapping in two.
He should've woken to disinfectant and beeping machines and that cheap hospital curtain that never closes all the way.
Instead: brine. Tar. Lantern. Wood.
He pushed himself up, hand sliding on a plank nailed smooth by years of boots, and faced the cutlass because something in him wanted a flat surface, any mirror at all.
A boy looked back. Black hair, matted with sea damp. Gray eyes that had the same color as the sky before a storm, but duller. A thin scar running along the jaw like someone had once told him to shut up and meant it. Sixteen. Maybe.
"That's not me," Jack said, and hearing his voice in the wooden room made it worse.
The memories didn't arrive politely. They crashed. Faces he didn't know. Laughter at his back. A rope burn on hands that weren't his. A girl's voice cutting like a blade: You're nothing but a curse, Jacklow.
Jack flinched like the words had been thrown at him—because the body he was in had flinched a hundred times already.
Jacklow Veynar. The name rose in him like something heavy from the bottom of a harbor. It didn't fit his mouth. It fit the room.
Outside, voices barked orders. A pulley squealed in a way that said someone hadn't oiled it because oil costs coin and coin goes to shot. The hull sighed. The sea answered.
He knew this music. He'd listened to it through headphones at 3 a.m.: rigging in a gale, deckhands stamping to a call, an officer's whistle. He had read ship's logs until numbers blurred—tonnage, draft, best point of sail. He'd memorized diagrams of yards and stays like other kids memorized football stats.
And now that world he'd loved from a distance had picked him up by the scruff and dropped him into the middle of it, like a cat daring a kitten to swim.
The latch clicked.
The man who filled the doorway didn't have to raise his voice. He took up the room by breathing. His coat had once been fine—gold buttons, good cut—but salt had eaten the edges and something darker had stained one lapel and never quite come out. Scars made a map of his face that told you where not to go.
Gray eyes landed on Jack and held.
"You're awake," the man said, and the boards under Jack's boots felt thinner.
Captain Dread Veynar. The name didn't come from Jack. It came from the body like a reflex; if you were in this room and those eyes were on you, you knew who he was.
Jack tried to stand straighter and his knee hit the cot.
"You've got all the bad luck and none of the work in you," Dread said, not unkind, not anything. "Your brothers bleed for the flag. Your sister bleeds for it. You make excuses."
Jack opened his mouth. He had nothing. Not a single sound that would make sense here.
Dread didn't wait for whatever he wasn't going to say. He jerked his chin toward the door. "Up."
Jack moved because a part of him already knew what happened if you didn't.
The corridor outside was low and smelled of men and salt and old meals. They climbed a short ladder, and the world opened—night air slapped his face and the deck tilted under a sky shot through with wind-blown cloud. Lanterns swung on hooks. The sails above were reefed, bellies tight. The crew watched because men at sea watch everything; the ones who weren't watching pretended not to and failed.
Dread walked out to the center of the deck and didn't have to ask for silence. It came with him.
He turned, voice carrying easy in the wind. "My son forgot the use of his hands."
A ripple went through the crew: some smirks, one or two glances away that looked like embarrassment if you were generous.
Dread pointed with two fingers to the boards beneath them. A smear ran from the starboard rail to the mainmast—dark, not yet brown in the lantern light. A stain with a story Jack didn't want told to him.
"You'll clear this before dawn," Dread said to Jack, like he was saying the tide turns. "Every inch. If the deck's still pink when the bell goes, you go over with it. Clear?"
His stomach dropped. It wasn't bravado; it wasn't theater. It was just a job with a clock on top and the sea underneath.
Jack nodded because words weren't moving through his throat.
"Boatswain," Dread said, and a barrel of a man with a voice like a church bell shoved a stiff brush and a bucket into Jack's arms. The water slopped onto his bare feet, cold enough to bite.
"Get on with it," the boatswain said. Not cruel. Bored. Which was worse.
Dread's gaze stayed on Jack a heartbeat longer, weighing something, then he turned and headed for the quarterdeck. The crew flowed back around their work and around Jack, the way water does around a piling: aware, not interrupting, still pushing.
Three figures didn't move with the rest.
The oldest had shoulders like a door frame and a scar that pulled his left brow into a permanent question. He wore the ship like a coat he'd grown into early. Twenty, if Jacklow's memory was telling the truth. Draven Veynar. Brother. The only one whose memory didn't sting.
Next to him, a leaner shape, eyes bright in the dark, mouth already half a smirk. Kairon. Eighteen. The smirk had too much practice to be honest.
And on the other side, a girl with her hair tied tight and fists tighter. Liora. Fifteen going on iron.
"Well," Kairon said, putting his hands on his hips like a stage actor, "Father does hand out charity when the mood takes him."
Jack kept his head down. He could feel the way the crew's attention bent when Kairon talked—some amused, more cautious. A prince of this place, but not the heir.
Liora's voice landed lower. "You should've stayed gone." The words shook the tiniest bit, the way a blade shakes after it hits bone. "All you do is make it worse."
Jack swallowed. The body he wore recognized that tone and wanted to fold itself smaller. He did not.
Draven didn't look at them when he spoke. "Enough."
Two syllables, and Kairon's smirk pulled back a fraction like it had been tugged on a string. Liora's fists didn't unclench, but she took one step back so Jack could breathe without bumping her shoulder.
Draven glanced at the brush under Jack's arm. "Start at the mast. Work out. Sand first, seawater second. Don't talk. Keep your head down." He paused, then added, "Change your grip when your hands go numb. They will."
Kairon laughed, light and ugly. "Look at the great Draven, giving lessons to the bilge." His smile didn't reach his eyes. His eyes were measuring something—how loud he could be here, how much wind the deck gave him to fill those sails.
Liora didn't laugh. She stared at Jack as if she could will him to become someone else and be angry at him for failing. "You weren't there when she died," she said, and that was the only part of it that was completely true, no matter which boy he was. "You don't get to stand under this flag like the rest of us."
She turned on her heel and left. The deck swallowed her. Kairon followed with a shrug that wanted to be careless and wasn't.
Draven stayed a second longer, not looking at Jack, not making it a moment, just standing there the way a post stands when a fence leans on it. Then he walked away too.
The crew's noise swelled again, the ship exhaled, the wind tugged at the reefed sails. Somewhere forward a gull laughed at nothing.
Jack set the bucket down and knelt. The stain looked darker up close. Blood dries sticky and leaves a halo even after the color goes; he knew that from reading about it, not from scrubbing it off a deck at night with strangers watching.
His hands moved before his head had decided. Brush, sand, water. Work a circle, small enough to finish. Don't chase the whole thing and drown in it. He'd read that too, some quartermaster's journal from two centuries ago. Funny, the things that turn real.
He scraped. The bristles rasped and squealed. The smell came up—copper and rot under the salt—and he had to breathe through his mouth.
You'll regret this, his mother's voice said, from a kitchen that didn't exist on this sea. He pressed harder until his shoulders burned.
When the pain made the world small and simple, the panic loosened its claws. He could think around it.
He was on a ship big enough to carry three masts and too many guns to count in the dark. She rode high enough that the spray didn't slap the midships. Freeboard told you as much as a flag did. The rig looked like a square-rigger gone mean. He could hear two bells, one forward, one aft, and they weren't in time—a sign of a crew more tired than tidy. The wind carried cold off the north; the smell said they were closer to the Blood Current than the trade lanes. He'd studied the map of this world until his father had told him to get a job and his mother had told him to stop talking at dinner.
It was not his world's map. But it rhymed.
He changed his grip when his fingers started to go dumb, exactly like Draven had said. He hated that he was grateful for the advice.
Boot steps stopped against the stain's edge. Jack didn't look up.
"You should've said something," Draven said quietly.
Jack looked then. The oldest Veynar had taken the windward side where the spray wouldn't hit his boots and the crew wouldn't hear. Smart. Or maybe it was habit.
"About what," Jack said, voice rough. It wasn't really a question.
"About why." Draven's eyes didn't move to the stain. They stayed on Jack's hands. "People don't go over the rail because the day was long. Not our people."
Jack shut his mouth before the wrong truth came out of it. Because I'm not your person, didn't seem like a line that would go down well. Because another boy snapped and I fell into the space he left was worse.
He shrugged instead. The smallest one he could make.
Draven's jaw ticked once. He wasn't a patient man—Jacklow's memory knew that the way you know where bruises have been—but he wasn't a cruel one. Not to his own. "It doesn't matter," he said after a beat that could've been an apology if there were a different flag overhead. "It won't again."
Jack went back to scraping. He let the rhythm take his shoulders. Sand, water, brush, wipe. The circle came clean, then the next circle. The deck went lighter under his hands. Not white. Boards never go white again after this. Lighter enough.
"Stop blaming pirates for Mother," Draven said. The words weren't grand. They came like something he'd been trying to drink quiet for a year and failed at. "The Government burned that village because it made a neat line on a map, and we were on the wrong side of it that night. That's all."
Jack's throat went tight around nothing. He thought of his mother's fingers finding the bridge of her nose, tired. You'll regret this. He wondered if she'd be at his hospital bed right now in a world where hospital beds existed. He wondered if there was a him in that bed who didn't know the names of sails and knots and ships that weren't real anymore.
He didn't say any of it.
Draven set something down near the bucket. A small canvas sack. "Ash," he said. "Boatswain keeps it for grease. Mix with water. Pulls blood faster." He hesitated, then added, "Don't be proud about tools. Proud men drown."
He walked away without waiting for thanks.
Jack sat back on his heels and stared at the little sack like it was a gift from a god he hadn't believed in since he was seven. He poured a pinch into the bucket, watched the water cloud, dipped the brush, and pushed the slurry into the stain. It came up easier. Draven was right. Of course he was.
The wind shifted. Somewhere above, the watch changed over and boots thudded the ladder rhythm you can hear even if you're asleep. A bell chimed once, then once again after a count that told Jack it wasn't yet midnight. He had time and pain and a very simple job that ended in air or water.
He worked.
Between the scrape and the splash and his breath going in and out, the fight at his parents' table threaded itself back through his head—his father's mouth going tight, his mother's voice soft because soft hurt more, his own words coming out bigger than his chest could carry. He had stormed out like a character in a story and the story had obliged by smashing a car into him. That's not how life is supposed to work, except when it does.
He found he wasn't thinking why me so much as all right then. Maybe that was Jacklow in him. Maybe it was his own stubbornness, repurposed.
He kept his head down. He didn't look for Dread on the quarterdeck because it didn't matter if Dread watched; the sea watched, and the sea had the final say. He didn't look for Kairon because Kairon would be looking for eyes. He didn't look for Liora because grief hates witnesses. He let the deck get lighter in small honest circles. He let his hands blister. He let the ache build into something simple and mean and steady.
When he had enough clean to see his own reflection in wet wood, not the cutlass mirror but a shimmering, warped version, he paused and looked anyway.
Not his face. It wouldn't be his face tomorrow either.
He breathed. Salt stung his nose. The brush handle was warm from his hands.
If this world wants to drown me, he thought, not saying it aloud because men listen for weakness at sea the way rats listen for bread, then I'll learn to swim. If they want me gone by dawn, I'll make the deck shine and let them eat their words.
He dipped the brush again, shoulders screaming their objection, and set the bristles to the next dark circle.
The lanterns rocked. The sea kept time. Somewhere aft, someone laughed at a joke Jack couldn't hear. Dawn was a promise and a threat in equal measure.
He worked toward it.