They fired the guns at dawn. The salvos did not belong to the sea. They belonged to Albion—brass and breath and a government that believed thunder could be bottled and sent north. Cannon smoke hung low above the quay like an oath. Flags stuttered in the cold wind, banners of merchant houses and naval ensigns snapping as if impatient. People came in their thousands—wives with knotted shawls, boys with sticky hands, newspaper hawkers with anything for a penny. The Albion Gazette had promised front-page triumph; prize horses and the mayor were promised parades. The Wraith and the Horror lay side by side, their hulls dark with fresh tar, sails reefed and smudged with coal smoke. They looked like animals bred for a long hunt. Gunnar Dickerson stood at the rail and watched the harbor swallow the horizon. He was twenty-six, with the knuckles of a stitcher and the shoulders of a man who could haul a coil of rope and set a feed for a man who’d been sick all night. He had a surgeon’s steady hands and a surgeon’s worry folded into him like a draft under a door. He’d signed on as surgeon’s mate because a bite of fame might mean more steady pay, a chance to buy his mother a proper roof, and because he could not think of leaving men to die simply for lack of someone who cared. His mother waited on the quay beneath a