AS THEY SPED toward the frigate, Magdalys started making out shapes in the sky above it. Dactyls! The squad had reached the Ocarrion, or some of them had anyway. More gunfire erupted, and then the deeper blasts of artillery shells.

Faster! Magdalys urged, and Missy growled and blasted forward. Up ahead, a dactylrider nose-dived toward the Ocarrion deck. Magdalys heard screams and saw bright flashes as more musket shots rang out. She held her breath for a few seconds, then the dactyl swooped up from the other side, now riderless. More dactyls dove now, and shouts, squawks, and sword clangs rang out over the crashing waves.

“Uh, Magdalys,” Redd called from behind her. “What are we going to do when we reach?”

Magdalys had just been wondering the exact same thing now that they were closing rapidly. She wasn’t sure what the mosasaurus was capable of, though she’d heard of them being used to ram warships during the naval blockades down south. But the Dactyl Hill Squad and the Vigilance Committee were on board now, and she didn’t know how many people she could safely fit on board Missy to bring them back to safety.

And anyway, it might not matter what Magdalys had planned at all. Missy let out a tremendous roar as they sped toward the ship. Her gigantic head rose out of the water, jaws spreading, and everything around them seemed to tremble, like Missy herself was a singular aquatic earthquake made of flesh, blood, tooth, and bone, and utterly unstoppable.

Magdalys lowered herself so her face was against Missy’s cool hide. Gently, mama, gently, she cooed. Missy didn’t seem to hear, just kept charging. Just snatch ’em up easy, love. We don’t want to destroy the whole boat. Please.

She was pretty sure destroying the whole boat was exactly what Missy wanted to do, and under any other circumstances Magdalys would have happily let her smash an escaping slave ship to smithereens. But not this time. Slowwwwww, mama, slow. You can take it out, just don’t take it all the way out. They didn’t slow, but Magdalys felt something different about Missy’s roared reply. She thought maybe, maybe, she had heard her.

“Hold on, everyone!” Magdalys yelled. More gunshots rang out as they reared up toward the Ocarrion, but they were too late: Missy’s gigantic jaws came crashing down on the artillery unit at the far end, obliterating it and shredding a huge chunk of the hull. Magdalys, Amaya, and Redd flew up into the air but managed to stay clinging on to the saddle as Missy pulled her mouth free and slammed back into the waves beside the ship. “Good girl!” Magdalys yelled, patting Missy’s neck and then following Redd and Amaya up the ladder to the deck.

On board the Ocarrion, chaos reigned.

A group of slavers was huddled at one end, as far from where Missy had struck as they could get, and they were firing intermittently with carbines and stabbing out with sabers when anyone got close. David Ballantine, Louis Napoleon, and a group of other Vigilance Committee agents had set up a barricade with some shipping crates at the steam chimney and were taking potshots over the top. Magdalys spotted Mapper and Two Step with them. Cymbeline stood beside them, blasting away with her shotty.

Amaya handed Magdalys a pistol and took up a position behind a crate. “Cover me,” she said, snapping open her carbine and shoving a bullet into it.

Magdalys loaded up the pistol the way she’d been shown the night they escaped from the riots. She’d never had a chance to learn proper shooting with Amaya, and she certainly wasn’t going to be able to learn much with everything else going on. Black powder went down the muzzle and in the chamber, then the ball went after it and you used the ramrod to pack it all in, clicked back the hammer and —

“YAAA!” came a collective roar from the far end of the Ocarrion. The slavers had decided to make a break for it. They poured out of their corner toward the improvised barricade. “Fire!” Louis Napoleon shouted, and gunshots rang out from either side. Several slavers collapsed where they stood or tumbled over the side, screaming. The charge made sense, Magdalys thought; they were boxed in and would either have to surrender or be massacred pretty soon.

And now they were heading straight for her. One slaver in particular, a young man with sideburns in a dark suit and a bowler hat, seemed to be staring directly at Magdalys as he charged, six-shooter raised.

She held her own pistol up, pointed at the man, held her breath, fired: CRACK! The blast sent tiny explosions bursting through her bones; when the smoke cleared she had no idea if she’d hit anyone or not, couldn’t make out the man who’d been coming at her in the melee. Then a spray of tiny wood chips cut into Magdalys’s face as a shot slammed into the crate beside her head. She looked up. The man in the bowler was closer now, raising his six-shooter again, and then an orange blur swept out of the dark sky and barreled into him, hurling him headlong into the sea with a scream and a splash.

Magdalys watched the dactyl swoop back into the night with a triumphant caw.

Ka-BANG! Amaya’s rifle let out a shot. Someone screamed, but again the smoke kept Magdalys from seeing much. She followed Amaya’s example and started reloading fast. She had a dagger, and a fierce bayonet extended from the end of Amaya’s rifle, but Magdalys wasn’t sure what she’d do if it came to hand-to-hand combat. Throw herself over the side of the ship, probably. Death by drowning had to be better than letting some wretched slaver gut her.

BLAM! BLAM! sang Cymbeline’s double-barrel shotgun. Then someone whooshed past with a shliiiiing of steel releasing from a scabbard and Magdalys heard yelling. Redd had jumped blade-first into the fray, his cutlass a glint of steel dancing through the night. He cleaved a path straight through the cluster of slavers, shoving and slicing as men fell screaming to either side until finally the last few survivors threw down their weapons and raised their hands, crying for mercy.

“The ship is ours!” Louis yelled.

“Hoorah!” everyone cheered.

Magdalys hugged Amaya as hard as she could. They made their way down a short flight of stairs to the main deck, where David and the Committee agents were already hog-tying their new captives. “Where are the others?” she asked.

“Sabeen is below,” Cymbeline said. “We sent her to check on the kidnapped orphans. Nice work with the mosasaurus!”

Magdalys waved away the compliment. “Missy did all the work, we were just along for the ride.”

Cymbeline raised an eyebrow. “Missy, huh?”

“Plus, Redd helped. Where is he anyway? He was amazing out there.” She searched the deck, caught sight of him glaring back toward the city through his spyglass.

The cabin door opened and a group of kids Magdalys recognized from the orphanage poured out, looking stunned. “Sabeen!” Amaya yelled, running across the deck and embracing her as she emerged. Magdalys dashed over too and they all hugged, and then Two Step was there and Mapper and everyone was shouting and finding their friends and making sure they were okay.

“Uh, guys,” Redd called from his spot staring out at the waves. “There are lights out there. A bunch of ’em. And they’re coming toward us fast.”