Blake Garrity had both rods in and the cooler lid down when Jesse decided the forecast was a liar.
"Clear all weekend," Jesse said from the helm. He tapped the screen twice, hard. "Zero percent. That's a zero, Blake. Look at it."
"I'm looking at the sky."
The sky to the west had gone the green of an old bruise. Twenty minutes ago it had been blue.
Blake coiled the last line and clipped the gaff to the rail. Weather was the one thing he respected on sight. Five days a week he sat in a crane cab a hundred and forty feet above the Port of Oakland and lifted forty-ton boxes off ships. He could set one down on a truck bed so softly that the lashing crew below bet beers on whether they'd hear it land. They usually lost. Wind was what turned a forty-ton box into a wrecking ball, so he had learned to read it.
This wind was wrong. It was coming from three directions at once.
"Jess. Turn us in."
"I'm turning, I'm turning. You're such a grandma about weather."
"I'm a grandma who's never dropped a box."
The squall hit before the bow came around. Rain arrived sideways and hard as gravel. The boat heeled hard. The cooler slid across the deck and over the side.
Blake grabbed the boathook out of its clips. A boathook was just a lever with a hook on the end, and he trusted levers.
Then the sea started to turn.
It turned in a circle around them, slow at first, then fast. The water at the edges rose into a wall, green and smooth as glass. The center dropped away. The boat slid down the slope of it with her engine screaming.
"Blake!" Jesse stood braced at the helm with both hands on the wheel, shouting his name over and over. "Blake, hold on to something!"
He held on to the boathook.
Under the roar, deep under the water, something made a sound. It was long and low, like a huge hull settling onto a dock. He felt it in his teeth.
The last thing he saw was Jesse's orange cap spinning on the water, high above him on the wall of the whirlpool, very small.
He woke up because something was eating the floor.
The noise came first. Scrape, crack, scrape. It sounded like somebody prying up decking with a crowbar, one board at a time.
Blake was lying on his side on wet wood. The wood was tilted. His cheek was in a puddle of seawater, and above him the stars were wrong.
He knew the stars over the Bay as well as his own gauges. These were too many and too bright, crowded into a band across the sky like spilled sugar. There was no moon he could see, and no city glow anywhere.
He sat up. Everything hurt in an ordinary way, like the day after moving a couch.
The boathook was still in his hand. His knuckles had locked around it.
He was on a ship, and it wasn't Jesse's boat. It was wooden and old, and its deck sloped down to the left at an angle that told him she was holed and sitting on something. A single fat mast stood out of the middle. A sail hung off it in tatters, ribbed with long poles, like a paper fan somebody had stepped on.
Beyond the rail, water broke white over rocks. She was hung up on a reef in the dark, a long way from any light.
Scrape. Crack.
Something came over the rail.
It was a crab the size of a dinner plate, and then a second one followed it, bigger. Their shells were the dull red of old brick. They moved sideways in quick little bursts, and their claws worked at the deck planks as they came, prying up splinters.
"Okay," Blake said. "No."
A plank squealed near the bow as one of them levered it.
Pain bloomed on his left shin.
He looked down. Nothing was touching his leg, and there was no crab near him. But the pain was real, a tight hot ache like a bruise somebody was pressing with a thumb. He looked at the bow, where the crab was working, and the ache pulsed in time with its claw.
"That's not how legs work," he told nobody.
"FEED ME."
The voice came from inside his skull. It was huge and hungry, and it sounded insulted.
Blake stood up so fast he nearly went over the low side.
"At last. Something awake. Something with hands." The voice rolled through him like a ship's horn in fog. "Feed me. I am owed. Nine islands fed me once."
"Who's talking?"
"Who? WHO?" The deck seemed to shiver under his boots. "I am the ship you are standing on, little stranger. I am starving, and those vermin are eating my ribs."
He looked around. There was nobody else on the deck and nobody in the water. The crabs clattered closer.
"I hit my head," Blake said. "That's fine. People hit their heads."
"You will hit it again if you stand there. Kill them. The tide turns at dawn. When it rises, this reef lets go of me, and I fill like a bucket. You would not enjoy that."
The first crab came at his ankle.
He didn't think about it. Nine years of loads had taught him what to do with weight coming at you sideways: don't stand under it, and don't fight it straight on. He stepped out of its path and slid the boathook's iron tip under the crab's shell where it met the deck. Then he lifted, with the rail for a fulcrum.
The crab went over on its back. Its legs bicycled at the stars. He drove the hook down into the pale underside and leaned on it.
It cracked, and it stopped.
"Huh," Blake said.
"Do not admire it. There are more."
The second crab took a slice out of his palm on its way past. He yelled and swung the pole like a bat, knocking it into the gutter along the rail. Then he pinned it and did the same thing again, levering and leaning until it stopped moving too.
Blood ran down his wrist. His hands were shaking.
"Good," the voice said. "Again."
"You could help."
"I am helping. I am telling you what to do."
Three came up over the bow in a row, and the ache moved from his shin to his ribs as they went to work on the planks. He fought them in the dark with a fishing boathook, a long way from anywhere he had a name for. One of them nearly took his ankle, a claw closing on his boot hard enough to dent the rubber. He kicked it off, hooked it, flipped it and killed it.
By the time the fifth one stopped moving, his palms were cut in four places. He was breathing like he'd climbed the crane ladder twice.
Five dead crabs lay on the slanted deck. Below him, the water in the hold sloshed louder than before.
"I don't know who you are," Blake said, between breaths, "but I've moved bigger problems than you."
"Doubtful," said the ship. "Now. Open the first one."
"Open it how?"
"With the hook. Under the shell, at the chest. There is a glassy lump in there. That is a core. It is food. It is the only food I have had in a very long time."
Blake knelt by the first crab. He didn't want to. He did it anyway, prying the shell back with the iron and wincing at the wet sound. Inside, under grey meat, something caught the starlight.
He worked it free. It was the size of a walnut and smooth as sea glass, faintly cloudy, warm in his cut palm.
"A core," he said.
"My core. Bring it to my heart."
"Your what?"
"The heart. The mast. The foot of the mast. Do I have to explain everything?" A pause. "Yes. Apparently I do."
He went down the slope of the deck to the mast. At its foot, where it went into the planking, the wood changed. It bulged into a dark knot as wide as a manhole cover, old wood twisted around itself, black with age and smooth as a river stone. It was cold to the touch, colder than the night.
"This is your heart."
"Lay the core on it. Your hand on top. Quickly."
Blake crouched there with a crab's insides in his fist and thought about how this would sound to Jesse. He thought about the doctors he'd be telling it to, if there were doctors. Then the deck lurched. Water hissed in somewhere forward, and the ache in his ribs flared.
He put the core on the knot and his hand over it.
For a second, nothing happened. Then the core went warm. Then it went hot, not burning, more like a mug of coffee. And then it sank.
It went into the wood the way water goes into dry sand. One moment it was under his palm. The next it was a soft give, and then it was gone. The knot under his hand was warm now, with a slow, deep pulse in it, like something very big turning over in its sleep.
"Ohhh," said the ship.
It was a groan of pure pleasure, the noise a man makes sinking into a hot bath after a double shift.
The hiss of water forward eased.
"More."
Blake laughed, a little wildly. "Yeah. Okay. More."
"Do not laugh at my dinner."
"I'm laughing at me. I'm feeding a boat."
"A ship," the voice said. "Boats are what I eat for breakfast. Figuratively. For now."
He opened the other four crabs. Four more cores came out, each a little different, one with a pink cloud in it and one almost clear. He carried them to the heart one at a time and pressed each down with his palm. Each one sank, and each time the warmth under his hand grew. His cuts stung, and then he stopped noticing them.
On the fourth core, he heard a new sound from the bow. It was a dry crackle, like ice forming on a pond, and he went forward with the boathook ready.
The worst hole was near the waterline on the low side, where the crabs had pried two planks loose. Seawater was bubbling in through it. As he watched, a crust began to spread over the gap from its edges. It was reddish and ridged like the crabs' shells, and it crept across the hole the way frost creeps over a windshield. The bubbling slowed. Then it stopped.
The ache in his ribs went with it.
"You grew a patch," Blake said.
"I grew armor," said the ship, with enormous dignity. "Carry the last one."
He carried the last one. When it sank into the knot, the sound came again.
It was the sound he'd heard under the whirlpool, long and low, a giant hull settling onto a dock. It came up through the soles of his boots.
A sheet of light slid up over the ship's wheel.
The wheel stood on a raised deck at the back of the ship, a big spoked thing of dark wood. The light hung above it like a pane of pale green glass, and there were words on it. He climbed up to it with his hands dripping.
```status (unnamed) | Level 2 | Rotten Junk HULL 10 | SAIL 4 | GUNS 0 | BITE 2 | HOLD 4 Grafted: Crab-Plate (hull, HULL +2) Captain: Blake Garrity | Hungry Captain ```
He read it top to bottom. The top line said what the thing was, and the numbers under it said what it could take.
The top line was the ship, with no name and level 2. An hour ago it had been level 1. The next line was five numbers, and he worked them out by what he'd seen tonight. HULL was the planks, and it had gone up with the patch: the +2 on the grafted line was already inside the ten. SAIL was the rag on the mast. GUNS was a zero, which was fair, since there weren't any. BITE had to be the bow, the part that hit things, and HOLD was what she could carry. All of them were low. He'd seen better numbers on a rental truck.
"Rotten Junk," Blake read aloud.
A junk was the kind of ship this was, he figured, the kind with the poles in the sail. The rotten part needed no explaining.
"An insult," said the ship. "Accurate. A junk like me tops out at fifteen in anything. Keep feeding me and it changes."
"Crab-Plate." That was the patch: the crab's shell, grown into the hull and added to the planks. Eat a crab, get its armor. He understood it the way he understood stacking, where the bottom box carries everything above it.
Then the last line.
Captain: Blake Garrity. Hungry Captain.
He hadn't told it his name. He stood with blood drying on his wrists and read his own name in green light, under the word captain, and something in his chest went tight and warm at once.
He'd been a crane operator for nine years, and a good one. Nobody had ever called him captain of anything.
He didn't like how good it felt. He read it twice anyway.
"Hungry Captain," he said. "I'm not the one who's hungry."
"No. I am," said the ship. "You are my captain, so you get my name. It means you feed me. Only you. Your hand is the only one I can eat from. Try to sound grateful."
"I'm the only one who can feed you."
"Yes."
"And if I don't?"
The deck was quiet for a moment. Water lapped against the hull, and somewhere out on the reef the surf hissed.
"Then I rot," the ship said. "Then I sink. And then you swim, little stranger, in a sea you do not know, toward a shore you cannot see."
Blake looked out over the rail at black water and white surf on rocks. Far off lay a darker line that might have been land, or might have been cloud.
"Fair," he said.
The sky in the east had gone from black to slate, then grey. A thin line of paler grey separated the sea from the sky.
"Listen to me now," the ship said, and its voice dropped low. "When the sun comes, put your hand on the wheel. Keep it there."
"Why?"
"Because I want to be yours. And because someone else will want me to be theirs."
He didn't understand that. He did it anyway. He'd done everything else it told him tonight, and he was still afloat.
Blake put his right hand on the wheel. The wood was cool and smooth under his cut palm, worn down by somebody else's hands for a very long time. Through it he felt the whole ship, faintly. The heart was warm at the foot of the mast. The new crab-shell patch sat stiff as a scab. The reef under the keel held her like a fist.
The green sheet faded, word by word, into the grey light.
Something cold settled on his wrist.
He looked down. It was the blade of an adze, the curved woodworking axe shipwrights used, and its edge rested on the back of his wrist exactly where it would do the most damage. The hand on the handle was square, brown and scarred with old cuts.
"Hand off my salvage," said a woman's voice behind him.
