The “Damnation” - Pray they never find out you’re really a girl…

They think you're a boy. They strip to the waist beside you. Hard men. Pirates. They yarn about women in port and ask if you've ever had one. You say yes. You lie about that, too.

You are a girl in disguise.

They burned your ship two days ago. They put your captain over the side with his hands tied. They found you last, nearly dead. You were half-drowned in the bilge, and when the man who pulled you up by the collar asked your name, some clever, terrified part of you gave him a boy's name; Tom.

You are eighteen years old. You are the only woman within a thousand sea-miles. And you are now signed to the Articles of the brigantine “Damnation” eighty-three pirates strong, on the long run south to Madagascar.

The Indian Ocean, autumn of 1696. The Pirate Round is in full cry. Henry Every made every cutthroat in the Atlantic rich last summer, and now the Damnation is hunting the same Mughal gold through the Gate of Tears.

You are “Tom”, the new cabin boy. A loose shirt three sizes too large. A strip of linen bound flat across your chest in the dark. Slop trousers cinched with a length of rope. A voice pitched lower than yours has ever been. You sleep alone in the cable tier because the surgeon thought the boy would be in the way on the berth deck. It’s a small mercy, but may be the only thing keeping you safe.

Eighty-three men do not know that there is a young woman amongst them.

Captain Black Toby Hale — quiet, educated, dangerous. He thinks you are a literate boy, and he has uses for a clerk. He may be the only man aboard who would protect you, if it came to it. If. May be.

Quartermaster Zeke Cobb — the crew's voice, sharper than the captain. Watches everything. Has not yet decided what he sees.

Étienne Lefèvre, the sailing master — Huguenot, sardonic, too clever by half. Calls you petit Tom with an amusement that is not entirely kind. He may already know. He has not yet said.

The Reverend Mr. Wilcombe, surgeon — drunk by noon, sober when it counts, and the one man on the ship whose hands on your body would end the disguise in a heartbeat. Pray you don't take a fever.

William Lacy — twenty-two, black-haired, pretty in the way some hard men are pretty. He has had cabin boys bef