Chapter 1

Eleana

The sea wants to kill me tonight, and I can’t stop grinning.

Wind screams in my ears, a banshee’s wail that tears the breath out of my throat and flings it into the dark. My class-40 tri-hull bucks beneath me, carbon fiber singing, amas knifing through water black as motor oil and streaked with ghostly foam. Spray slaps my face—ice pins, a thousand of them—salty and bright and stinging. I taste brine and a thin thread of copper where my lip has split. The tiller yanks like a pissed-off bull, trying to tear my shoulder from its socket. I plant my feet, the non-skid biting my soles, and lean my whole body into it.

“C’mon, girl,” I shout over the gale, voice ripped thin and ragged, “dance with me!”

Sails groan like cathedral doors. The mainsail booms and shudders as we take the crest wrong, but I flatten her with a hard yank on the sheet, teeth bared, and we skim up the heaving face—a slick, slate wall banded in green lightning. The sky is a churned vat of ink and bruise, so low it feels like it’s pressing on my skull, and every few seconds it splits with that sickly emerald flash that leaves afterimages inside my eyes. The thunder doesn’t roll; it detonates, a concussion you feel more than hear. And under the thunder—God help me—something else. A sound like the planet taking a breath, like a cathedral organ one octave too low for human ears, humming in my bones.

I laugh into it. Half joy, half dare. “You think you’re scary? I’ve met scarier.”

Cancer is a quieter storm, but it chews deeper. The doctors’ faces had that waxy look when they said “terminal” as if the word itself might shatter if they spoke too loud. The nurse—sweet woman, soft hands—kept calling me “brave,” and my mother squeezed the life out of my fingers while pretending not to cry. Brave. Such a stupid word for somebody who got unlucky cells. Brave is this: my body a lever against a screaming tiller, my breath torn thin and ecstatic, the sea throwing haymakers and me grinning with bloody teeth. Brave is choosing the ocean over the bed.

We rise. The bow climbs and climbs until I feel the weight go light, until the deck under my toes trembles and the horizon tilts into madness. For a bright, ridiculous second we’re nose-up at an angle that would make a saner sailor puke, and my whole world is the sharp stink of ozone, the whip-crack of halyards, cordage weeping against blocks, and the taste of spray in my mouth. I drag in air that smells like wet iron and cold stone and something green, bitter, alive.

“Hold together,” I murmur to the boat—she needs a name and I never gave her one; she hates that; I feel it in my bones—but I stroke the salt-slimed tiller as if it’s a wrist I love. “Hold together, and I’ll never forget you again.”

We crest. For a breath, we are suspended—boat, girl, a few hundred pounds of sailcloth held up by nothing but sheer stubbornness and the wind’s hard fist—and then gravity remembers us. We pitch down the backside of the wave like a rollercoaster from hell. My stomach free-falls; the bow slams; spray explodes skyward. Something metallic somewhere aft rattles like a bag of bones. I whoop. I can’t help it. It rips out of me, raw and feral. This is living. This is every cell in my body refusing to go quietly.

“Eleana,” I hear my mother say in my head, weary and fierce, Eleana, don’t you dare. She said it last month about a much smaller storm, standing in our doorway in a robe, the house humming with oxygen-machine breath and chamomile steam from the kettle. The nurse was asleep in the recliner, mouth open, a soft snore ticking like a metronome. The hall nightlight painted a square of faint amber on the floor. The clock hands made their tiny insect jump.

I crept like a thief.

Backpack already stuffed: EPIRB, flares, med kit, extra gloves, foulies rolled and lashed, the little bag of pills they sent me home with that I swore I wouldn’t take. Dad’s old sailing knife, honed to wicked. Charts. The cheap compass I bought with babysitting money when I was twelve because the real one was “too good for a kid” and I wanted something that was mine. I slid that compass into my pocket where it etches its circle even now, a round bruise over my hipbone.

My parents’ door was cracked. I saw shapes—a mountain and a coastline—under the duvet. The oxygen machine hissed, sighed, hissed. The smell of eucalyptus ointment and laundry powder and the faint, sour note of fear that clings to sickrooms. I put the note on the dresser, under the little stone whale Dad brought me from Maine when I was nine.
I have to go. You know I have to. I love you. Please forgive me. —E.

Down the stairs in socks so no creak would betray me. Keys already palmed. The night had that thin glass chill that makes breath look guilty. The nurse sighed in her sleep and turned, the blanket slipping off her shoulder. I covered her again. Whispered “Sorry.” Kissed my fingers and touched the doorframe. Superstition is a sailor’s drug; I gulp it by the handful.

The marina was a gasp of halyards against masts, lines clicking, water lapping like a mouthful of teeth. Diesel and salt and kelp and tar. I slunk down the dock with my hood up and my heart battering the cage of my ribs like a bird. Untied lines with shaking hands and threw my pack aboard. When I slipped the last spring line and we began to drift, a wild light filled me. Not joy. Not yet. Something fiercer. A defiant yes.

“Don’t you dare,” Mom had said. But I dared.

Now the Horn is daring back.

Ahead, the horizon rears up with a wave so big it cuts off the sky. I swear it’s got a face—a blind titan’s face—and we’re an ant crawling toward its lip. The wave heaves, higher, higher, the crest raveling, the belly dark and ridged and smooth as whale skin. I feel the tri-hull lighten, the amas lifting, the center hull keening as it scrapes into the upward wall. Every rope goes taut, a harp strummed by a god. My hands lock on the tiller; my shoulders burn; my thighs shake.

“Talk to me,” I pant, and I’m not sure if I’m talking to the boat or my own stubborn heart. “Okay. Okay. We climb. We climb. Reef to second. Ease the traveler. Don’t you round up. Don’t you stall, you magnificent bitch.”

The sail flutters then bites, the boat surges, and we start up that water mountain. My mouth is a strip of rawhide. My lungs are bellows. Spray needles my eyes; I don’t blink. Noise telescopes into a single note that might be my own blood. We climb and I talk, because talking keeps panic from growing teeth. “That’s it. That’s it. You were built for this. I was built for this. We don’t die in beds. We don’t die in pity. Up, up, up—”

The crest throws a white mane. For a second there is only white—white air, white water, the ocean’s cold hand across my face—and in that white I see, insane and perfectly clear, Dad’s hands around a mug, a ring of coffee stain on the morning paper’s weather map. Storm this weekend, he’d said, eyebrows up, the way he used to when he wanted to talk boats and Mom wanted to talk anything else. We learned our wind by watching moving ink.

“Come on!” I roar, and the boat answers with a knife-edge jump.

We punch through.

The bow clears the lip; the stern follows, slow and then with a lurch; the whole boat comes into the air just enough that my stomach tries to crawl into my throat. And then the slap—God, the slap—as we fall down the backside. It knocks a grunt out of me and a curse and my laugh, too, because we did it, we actually did it, and for a heartbeat I’m invincible.

“Ha!” I crow, voice torn raw. “Ha—ha—”

The sky rips open.

It’s like someone dragged a neon scalpel across the belly of the night. Not white lightning. Not the friendly purple spears that fork and go. This is green, violent green, too bright, wrong bright, and it doesn’t fork so much as tear, as if reality is canvas and somebody on the other side has decided to see what happens when you cut a slit. The light washes the sea a sickly glow, phosphorescence on steroids. My boat shivers. My skin prickles. Every tiny hair stands up, and a taste like hot pennies blooms under my tongue.

The thunder that follows isn’t thunder. It’s a howl. Deep as tectonic plates dragging. It makes the deck vibrate, makes the rigging sing a note I’ve never heard, makes the fillings in my teeth ache. The water to port heaves and twists, the surface rippling in concentric circles that break into spirals. A current grabs us—hard, invisible hands—and the boat yanks sideways so suddenly I slam hip-first into the coaming. Pain flashes white. I cling to the tiller, breath gone, and try to correct, but the rudder might as well be a butter knife in a blender.

“Shit—shit—shit,” I gasp, and the word is a prayer.

It’s a whirlpool. But not like any whirlpool I’ve read about in old pilot charts, not a tidy eddy with a polite little dimple. This thing is a cathedral of water rotating, a broad black mouth rimmed in flipping, scummed green, the size of a stadium, maybe more. It drags with the steady, awful patience of a moon. The center is a dark pupil, and lightning—still that violent emerald—laces upward from it in thin, silent filaments like the roots of a tree growing upside down.

“The hell are you,” I whisper. The air smells wrong—hot dust, cinnamon bite, burned sugar, like an electrical fire in a spice market. My skin tingles. The compass on the bulkhead spins like it’s drunk. The depth sounder throws gibberish. The wind goes strange—still howling, but under it a hush, as if a glass dome has been lowered over us.

I throw the tiller hard, try to put my bow on the rim to ride it. I’ve surfed tides; I know the trick is to keep moving, keep your angle, not let the stern swing. The mainsheet burns my palms as I take it in; the rope bites deep, skin parting like wet paper. Blood slicks the fibers. I wrap three turns around my forearm—idiot move but I’m out of choices—and heave. “Come on,” I hiss through my teeth. “Come on, we’re not dying in a drain.”

For a breath, the boat listens. We slither toward the outer edge, the stern tugged but the bow nosing into slightly calmer water. The spray that hits me now has grit in it—stones? shells?—little needles that ping off the mast. Out of the corner of my eye I see silver shapes spiraling up from the depths—jellies? No. Not jellies. They are shapes, geometries with trailing wires that flex like tendrils, pulsing with faint light, and when lightning cracks again, I see faces inside them, wrong faces—too many eyes, too neat teeth—staring and then gone. The sound in the air hiccups, like a radio flipping through stations, and for a second I hear words in a language I don’t know that feel like pressure on my eardrums. My tongue goes numb.

“Not today,” I tell whatever listens. My voice is a rasp. “You don’t get me today.”

We climb the whirl. The boat skates high, drops low, skates high again—a tilted racetrack of water—and each time I can almost feel the edge, like a lip I can hook a fingernail over and pull. The traveler car chatters, shuddering; the vang screams; somewhere a shackle bangs like a bell. I talk and swear and laugh, because if I shut up the fear will get big enough to breathe. “That’s it—yes—hold—hold—one more—one more—”

A shadow moves in the heart of the whirlpool.

At first I think I’m seeing a trick of lightning—some big hunk of debris, a tree or a mast or a drowned shipping container—but then the shadow curves the wrong way and lifts and keeps lifting. Water sheets off something scaled. Claws like scimitars rake the air. A head breaks the surface—horned, ridged, eyes like coins of molten bronze—and the breath that pours out of that mouth is steam hot enough to hit my face from forty yards away. It smells like liquid iron and old incense and the inside of a struck match.

“Okay,” I say, absurd and small, a hysterical laugh breaking free. “Okay, sure. Sure. Why not.”

A dragon. A fuck-off enormous dragon shoulders out of the green-lit throat of the maelstrom. Its wings beat once, twice, throwing curtains of water that slam my sails and make the tri-hull shudder as if it’s been punched. Black scales edged in sick light; a keel of bone down its chest; spines along its tail; the whole thing so big it makes the wave we climbed feel like a puddle ripple. Something moves on its back, strapped in with harness and grit—someone. Humanoid. Broad-shouldered. Skin a deep, storm-bruise green, slick with spray. Braided dark hair. Tusks glinting in the lightning. An orc, my brain supplies, because why not tear the logic bandage off all at once. He’s not riding the dragon so much as fighting it, one hand in the harness and the other jabbing a hooked spear into the join of scales at the neck. The dragon twists, trying to bite him, and he bashes its snout with the butt of the spear and laughs—actually laughs—like a wolf.

“What the—” I can’t finish the sentence. There are no words big enough.

The minotaur and the dragon are in their own war, and the whirlpool is their arena. Every beat of those wings digs us deeper into the spin, every lash of that tail kicks up a wall of water that hammers my hull. I crank the tiller with my whole body, trying to hold the line I earned, trying to stay on that precious, knife-thin shelf near the rim. My hands are slick and raw and split; I can’t feel my fingers. Blood makes the rope slicker and I try to wipe it on my shorts and smear it instead. The dragon’s head whips; the minotaur plunges the spear again; a gout of steam erupts, and the heat of it hits my face in the cold like a slap.

“Get out of my storm,” I snarl, because apparently I’m the sort of idiot who tries to scold mythological apex predators.

The dragon shrieks, a horrible metal-on-bone scream that makes my eardrums flutter. It flares its wing to pivot and that wing—leather and bone and rain—comes down like a living wall. The blast of air and water it throws slams into my sails. The boat heels so hard the starboard ama digs and the center hull skips like a stone and for a second I think we’re pitchpoling. I dump the main, but too late, too late; the force of it knocks us off the rim line. I feel it like a slip of a boot on a ladder rung. We go skidding inward, faster, the hulls beginning to hiss.

“No you don’t,” I whisper, panicked and furious. “No you goddamn don’t.”

I throw the tiller. The rudder bites. The bow nips toward the rim again. A breath away from a save. A breath from cheating death.

The dragon’s tail scythes.

It’s not deliberate. We are nothing to it. But that scythe of wet bone clips the aft quarter like a battering ram. The impact isn’t a bang; it’s a thud that goes through deck and ribs and teeth, a golf club to the kidney of my boat. The world tilts. The stern swings. The tri-hull yaws and we lose the bite and suddenly we are sideways in the spin, slewing like a car on black ice, stern-first toward the mouth of the whirlpool.

“Fuck,” I breathe, and it’s not a curse now; it’s a sacrament.

I grab the sheet with both hands. Skin parts. I don’t even feel it anymore. I haul and wrap and drop and the rope whines and smokes a little where it runs. My forearm is a tourniquet of salt-burn pain. The knife is out, I don’t remember pulling it, but it’s there in my teeth, bitter steel taste and the faint ketchup tang of old blood. I spit it into my hand and slash the last wrap so the boom can swing free and keep us from capsizing as the spin tries to roll us. The boom goes, wild and violent; I duck and it takes a hank of hair and a ribbon of skin off my knuckles as a souvenir.

The minotaur looks at me. For a heartbeat—I swear on every ugly scar I’ve earned—those molten eyes find me. The green lightning throws a jag of light across his face and his grin is pure lunatic joy. He yells something that sounds like a toast and then the dragon rears and they’re fighting again, claw against spear, ancient as myth and twice as stupid, and they vanish in a curtain of spray as the whirl’s throat gulps.

The sound changes. The world tightens. My ears pop and stay popped. The air pressure goes sideways, my head a balloon being squeezed from both ends. The storm noise—the wind, the water, the sail’s boom—slides away, like someone is turning a knob that makes sound into syrup. What’s left is that low organ note, the world-hum and a distant chorus of voices, people speaking backward under water. The green lightning doesn’t flash now; it flows, veins lighting through cloud like the sky is made of glass and someone poured poison into it.

We’re in it.

The whirlpool takes us the way a mouth takes a sugar cube. Not a swallow—an insistence. The deck tips into an angle no boat should survive, and my legs splay, and every muscle in me is a wire. The hull groans, a long, helpless sound like an animal in a trap. I feel the mast shudder, the stays humming with a note that is almost a cry. I snatch a breath and it tastes like burned cloves and rain on hot pavement.

“Not today,” I tell the sea. “I’m not done.”

The sea does not give a single shit.

We drop. It feels like the world has become a spiral staircase made of water and we are taking those stairs six at a time. The bow knifes; spray hits my face and it’s warm now, god, warm and slick and smelling like beeswax and something that might be flowers if flowers had a funeral. The mainsheet rips out a wet scream and my hand goes with it until I let go or it tears my fingers off. I let go. The rope burns across my palm and leaves little satiny strips of skin behind like ribbons on a maypole.

“Hold,” I beg the mast, because the mast is the spine of the world right now, and if it goes there is no world. “Hold, hold—”

And of course the mast answers the way bones answer when you ask them to be steel. With a sound like a rifle shot, the middle panel cracks. The carbon splits along a seam I’ve stared at a hundred times and never feared. The rigging goes slack-then-taut, a whip; the boom swings wild; the whole boat shivers with that sick, final shudder of something that has been asked too much for too long.

The deck tilts into an angle that makes the horizon a smear. I slide, knees buckling, shin slamming into a cleat hard enough to make stars burst in my eyes. The rope I’d wrapped around my arm turns traitor and jerks, wrenching my shoulder; I bark an animal sound and bite it back down because I will not scream yet, not yet, not—

“Okay,” I say to nobody and everyone, my voice almost calm, which is how you can tell I’ve crossed some threshold. “Okay. Well… fuck.”

The sky flares one last mad time, emerald lightning lancing down the throat of the world, and the last thing I see before the blackout grabs me by the back of the neck is impossible: the dragon’s head turning back like it’s looking at me, eyes bright as coins, and the orc’s mouth splitting in a crazy grin as he raises his spear in salute—

—and then the dark folds up over me like a wave, warm and absolute, the storm’s howl sliding into silence as if someone reached into the hurricane and flipped off the switch.

I go out laughing, because if this is it, then goddamn did I pick a way to go.

I wake to birdsong.

Not the raucous, gull-wheeling cries of the South Atlantic, not the thin metallic shrieks of terns—no, these are rounder, stranger. Warbles and flutes and a staccato clacking like somebody shaking maracas. My eyes crack open against blinding light. The sun is vicious, overhead and merciless, like it’s personally offended by my existence.

I groan, throat raw as sandpaper. “Well… shit. Either I died and woke up in a petting zoo, or…” My voice croaks. I cough brine, spitting salt onto the deck. My head feels packed with wool. My arms, raw rope burns and blood-cracked blisters. My ribs ache where I slammed into—God, what did I slam into? A cleat? The storm? The world?

The storm—oh, fuck. The whirlpool. The dragon. The minotaur with the maniac grin. The memory claws through me like a hangover flash, so surreal I almost laugh. “Dream, hallucination, brain tumor fireworks… pick your poison, Eleana.”

I blink and force myself upright. The deck tilts gently beneath me, not the wild bucking of a storm-tossed sea. My boat—my stubborn, beautiful, nameless tri-hull—is bobbing as docile as a rubber duck in a bath. Turquoise water gleams around us, clear enough I can see fish flashing like dropped coins beneath the hulls. The air smells wrong—warm, floral, heavy with the musk of green things. Not the sharp, salty knife-edge of Cape Horn, but a sweet, cloying perfume that coats my tongue.

“Where the hell…” My voice cracks again. I swallow, throat raw, and croak: “This isn’t South America. No way.”

One mast is snapped clean, a blackened fracture tangled in the rigging like a broken bone. The sails hang shredded, flapping weakly. But the hull floats. She floats. I run my palm along the deck, sticky with dried salt and something coppery. My blood. The sting in my palms flares as I peel my hands open. Rope burns angry and swollen, welts ridged with embedded fibers. Splinters. Good. Pain means alive.

“Alright, Captain Baker, damage report,” I mutter. “Hull intact. One mast down. Sails fucked. Crew status: still zero.” I bark a laugh, hoarse and cracked. “Rations: what’s left in the locker, which I didn’t inventory before going insane and sailing into the goddamn apocalypse.”

I stumble below deck, nearly cracking my skull on the hatch. The cabin smells of mildew, salt, and blood-soaked bandages. My bandages. The dry bag with food is mercifully sealed, but the contents are depressing: two sleeves of crackers, one squashed protein bar, a half-jar of peanut butter, and a gallon of water. “Oh yeah, we’re living large,” I say. My stomach twists, not in hunger but in some hysterical approximation of laughter.

I grab the half-empty bottle and take a careful sip. Warm plastic tang, faint algae. It tastes like survival. I pour a trickle over my face and wince as salt stings raw skin. The reflection in the water-bubbled steel kettle startles me—eyes red, skin pale, hair plastered in snarls across my face. I look like a drowned rat in denial.

“Still cute though,” I rasp, middle finger at my reflection. “Fuck you too.”

Climbing back on deck, I shade my eyes against the sun. Ahead—lush green cliffs rise sheer from the turquoise sea, dripping vines, massive trees crowding to the edge. Bright flowers scream color from the greenery. And the sky… the sky’s wrong. Not the pale cobalt of Chile. It’s deeper, richer, indigo-tinted, and there’s something off about the sun’s angle. The clouds are too crisp, edges burning with greenish shimmer.

I grip the tiller, even though it’s useless with one mast gone. “Chile, my ass. I’ve been around the Horn twice, and I’d remember this postcard-from-Jurassic-Park bullshit.”

The tiller jerks weakly as the current nudges us toward a gap in the cliffs. I coax what’s left of the sails, improvising a jury rig, sweat slicking my back. Hours pass—or maybe only minutes; the sun hammers time flat. My arms ache. My legs tremble. My throat burns with every muttered curse. But finally, blessedly, the tri-hull drifts into a small cove, ringed by pale sand and overhung with palms. The water calms, glassy and blue-green.

I drop anchor with a grunt, muscles screaming. The chain rattles like coins in a miser’s fist. The hull settles, sighing. I slump against the mast stump, heart thudding like a drum.

“Landfall,” I announce to no one. “Captain Baker, survivor of storms, whirlpools, and hallucinations. Now starring in Gilligan’s Fever Dream.”

I pull on my boots, the cracked leather stiff with salt. Each step crunches as I stagger down the gangplank I rig from a broken spar. My feet sink into sand white as bone, warm as fresh bread. The jungle breathes heavy just beyond the treeline—humid, wet, alive. It smells like rot and honey, green things in every stage of life and death.

I draw my machete from its sheath. The blade feels too heavy, my arm trembling, but the weight steadies me. “Okay,” I mutter. “Recon. Check the terrain, maybe find fresh water, don’t get eaten by mosquitoes the size of drones. Easy.”

The sand shifts to tangled roots and loam as I push into the jungle. The air thickens, muggy, buzzing with insect chatter. Leaves slap my face, wet with dew. My boots sink into black earth, spongy with decay. My shirt clings, sweat streaming down my spine.

And then—

The world shudders. A bass note, deeper than thunder. Birds explode from the canopy in a screaming cloud. The ground itself trembles under my feet.

“Oh no,” I whisper.

Another roar follows, closer. Not thunder. Not wind. A sound that claws the primitive part of my brain that remembers we are prey. My chest seizes; my heart spikes.

The trees crash apart, snapping like matchsticks. A beast steps into the clearing, sunlight scalding its scales—green-brown hide, massive hind legs, jaws lined with steak-knife teeth. Thirty feet tall if it’s an inch. Its head swings, yellow eyes locking on me, and it bellows, hot stinking breath rolling out, smelling of meat and rot.

I gape. My throat scrapes. Then I croak:

“Nope. Fuck this. Fuck you. Fuck that. And fuck that especially.”

I spin and run. Branches whip my arms. Roots grab my boots. My breath rasps like broken glass in my throat. Behind me, the ground shakes with each step the monster takes. Roar after roar pounds my eardrums.

“Why is it always dinosaurs?!” I shout, panic a cracked laugh in my voice. “Why not kittens? Why not ponies? No, let’s give Eleana Baker the T-Rex Special!”

I bolt, lungs tearing, sweat stinging my eyes. The world narrows to pounding feet and snapping branches and the death-drums behind me. My heart screams. My body burns. I don’t look back. I can’t.

My toe catches a root. I fly. Crash. The machete skitters from my hand as I slam into loam, breath torn from my chest. Dirt fills my mouth, bitter, gritty, alive with ants. My ribs flare white-hot agony.

The ground shakes. Boom. Boom. BOOM. The dinosaur’s shadow falls over me, blotting the sun.

I claw for the machete, fingers numb. My breath comes in sobs. “No, no, no…”

Its roar splits the jungle. A wall of sound. My body trembles against the earth as the stink of its breath washes over me—hot, wet, metallic with old blood.

And I know, down to the marrow, that I am prey.