"Wet Powder, Dry Steel"

Pull the trigger now on the man reaching for the blade — wet powder be damned — and break for the dunes with Marrow before the tall one can level his fowling-piece."" Tom squeezed the trigger.

The flint snapped. The pan hissed — a small, wet, despairing sound — and then, against every law Tom knew of powder and sea, the pistol kicked in his hands like a living thing. White smoke bloomed. The shorter man took a quarter-step backwards, looked down at his own chest with an expression of mild, almost scholarly surprise, and sat down in the sand.

He did not get up again.

The tall one was already moving. The fowling-piece swung up — long, slow, certain. Tom dropped the spent pistol, seized Marrow under the arms, and hurled them both sideways behind the half-buried log as the air above him split open with a crack that punched a fist-sized chunk of driftwood into splinters.

"Run, boy," Marrow rasped. "Drop me and run."

Tom did not answer. He hauled. The captain's heels carved twin furrows in the wet sand, and the splinter under his ribs ground audibly, and Marrow made a noise no man should make and then bit it off behind his teeth. The dunes were ten paces. Eight. Five.

Behind them, the tall man was reloading — Tom could hear the ramrod's quick, practiced rattle, the prayer of a soldier who had done this in worse places than a foreign beach. He had perhaps fifteen seconds.

He cleared the dune's crest and tumbled them both into the long sea-grass on the leeward side. The drum was very close now. Voices answered it from within the jungle — three voices, four, calling to one another in a tongue Tom had never heard.

Marrow's hand found his collar and pulled him close.

"The packet, boy. Burn the packet before they take it. Swear it."