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were dents on the side, as if from bullet fire, and scorch marks. This ship had seen battle.
    “Get us as close as you can,” Mary commanded. “We’re climbing up.”
    The soldier at the helm of our boat nodded in the affirmative. He guided us alongside the ship and threw up a series of ropes, which hooked over the railing. My heart raced with a combination of excitement and fear.
    “No communication or sign of survivors,” another of our soldiers announced into his handheld radio. “At the command of Queen Mary, we are climbing aboard.”
    “Roger,” the steady voice across the water replied. “Proceed with caution.”
    Mary reached eagerly for the ropes, determined to go up first. I followed her, with Wesley and the other soldiers behind me. As I climbed up the side of the ship in my velvet evening gown, my bare feet cold against the side of the tanker, adrenaline shot through my veins. This was crazy, I thought. We were all crazy. My hands slipped for a moment on the rope, and my heart skipped a beat, but I quickly regained my footing and kept going. “It’s okay, Eliza,” I heard Wesley’s voice below me, and I felt calmer.
    Finally I reached the edge of the platform. A hand appeared over the side to help me up.
    I realized as I grabbed it that it wasn’t Mary’s hand.
    And the moment I stepped over to stand on the vast deck of the tanker, I knew that what I had feared all along was true.
    We had made a terrible mistake.

7
    “Wes—,” I started to say, but he was already clambering over the edge, standing next to me on the deck. He immediately raised his rifle. Behind Wesley, other soldiers began to appear. When they saw what we were facing, they quickly pointed their weapons at the ready. But there were only a dozen of us, and far, far more of them.
    We stood, shivering and silent, in the middle of a forest of weapons. Swords, spiked iron clubs, and fierce bloody hooks gleamed in the moonlight. More terrifying still were the men who carried them. They looked like pirates from the storybooks Mary and I had read as children, with their strange assortment of clothing and their sunburned skin. Their eyes glinted dangerously.
    “Please,” Mary began to say, “we come in—”
    But she didn’t get to finish her sentence. A spear shot through the air toward her, to land squarely in the chest of the soldier next to her. He stumbled backward against the railing, blood oozing from his mouth, and crumpled into a heap on the deck.
    “Eliza!” Wesley immediately threw himself in front of me, shielding me with his own body as he fired shot after shot with his pistol. But anger coursed through me. I picked up the rifle that the fallen soldier had dropped and stepped out from behind Wesley to start shooting. Only then did I see Mary running across the deck, a clear target.
    “Stay here!” Wesley cried, knowing what I was about to do. “I’ll get her!”
    But just as he started to move for Mary, a frightening figure tossed some kind of weighted net over her. She tripped and fell, tangled in the wires of the net, letting out a raw, angry scream that cut through the cold night air like the blade of a knife.
    I turned and yanked the spear out of the fallen soldier next to me. It was still warm, mottled with blood. Around me the deck was a swirl of chaos—clashing weapons, gunfire, bodies falling. But my vision narrowed, reducing everything to a distant clamor except for one figure. Wesley.
    I hurried after him, covering his back as he moved forward to cut Mary out of the net. A tall man with crooked teeth appeared, an iron spike in his hand. I slammed the spear into the side of his head, knocking him forcefully to the deck without slowing down. I had to get to Wesley.
    Mary was still yelling, her eyes bloodshot and wild, thrashing desperately about in an attempt to break free. “Mary,
stop
!” I screamed. The more she panicked, the more tangled she became.
    I hurried toward her and slipped on a pool of blood,