Captain Trevor Murray leaned back in his

chair, mulling over the details of the

previous days. He had always been

fortunate on the waters; he had always

somehow scraped by until the end of the

season without a single casualty.

He was a firm believer in not allowing the

sea to collect the souls of his men.

Although

they took their food from the sea’s open

mouth, he did not believe it was necessary

to offer up human sacrifices for this

privilege. He had stayed in business long

enough without appeasing any pagan

gods—and he was quite certain that the

gods did not pay close attention to Alaska anyway. Trevor did not accept that losses were bound to happen as most others did. He held

that they were the result of carelessness and inefficiency, and he chose his men cautiously to

avoid having either of these blights on his boat.

The conditions of Leland’s demise had been strange. The captain had begun to

wonder in the moments before the incident whether the man had been feeling all that well.

“Did you hear a strange noise, Captain?” Leland had asked in his suspicious but

respectful manner.

Trevor had briefly paused, as if to listen, to satisfy the man. Perhaps his mind had

been too occupied with the remaining tasks on board, but he had heard nothing. “Just the

whistling of the wind, Leo. A storm’s not far off, but we’ll be home long before it hits. Why

are you so agitated?”

“I just… I swear I saw something in the water earlier.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.” Leo had been so tense that he twitched when Arnav dropped a

coil of rope a few feet away from him. “I am a bit tired and feverish. Might just be coming

down with something and seeing things.”

“Just relax—we’ll be back to shore soon. A hot meal and a warm bed will fix you right

up, son.” Now, in retrospect, his own words made him cringe.

The weather had been benevolent while the day had unfolded smoothly. There was no

way that Trevor could have expected anything unusual on such a humdrum fishing trip. After

hauling up the pots and completing all of the most grueling tasks, the crew had begun to bask

in their communal sense of accomplishment and good cheer. They had been turning the ship

around and preparing to head home when the first mate, Doughlas, had noticed that Leland

was missing. None of the men could find him below or above deck, and no one had shouted

for a man overboard. Everyone had been puzzled, and Trevor had felt the first pangs of true

panic he’d experienced in over thirty years. Leo had just seemed to vanish.

The crew had suggested that the young man they fondly called “Leo” might be taking a

nap somewhere. It had been a long trip on the water, and the seasoned seamen were used to

working inhuman hours. They had considered that he had been hiding or trying to pull some

strange kind of prank. It had only taken a few hours for the Magician’s temperament to

progress from mildly amused to generally annoyed and finally to disbelieving and appalled. It

was hard to accept that a man was dead when there were no details to process regarding the

incident. Nothing to examine, nothing to understand.

The last person to speak with Leo had been Edward, the Jamaican. When asked

about the conversation repeatedly by the crew, Edward lost his cool at having to revisit, dozens

of times, that Leander had only told him that he was going to take a leak. The Jamaican had

cursed incessantly, while wiping tears from his eyes with his sleeves. “I thought it was safe

enough for him to go to the fucking washroom on his own. I didn’t think he was in danger of drowning while urinating! Toilet monsters that grab you by the wang and pull you down to a

horrifying death-by-piss haven’t exactly been my major concern since preschool.”

Now the men were drowning their woes in women and booze. They loved the

occasional sojourn in Soldotna for that purpose, but their woes usually did not require such a

substantial sloshing to be adequately submerged.