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For a moment, Nigel heard the blessed sound of Devi's footsteps sprinting overhead, across the deck then muffled by the sand. Someone else tracked from outside, on the landward side of the hull—and more gunshots followed, with a distinctive grunt of pain and the smack of impact into flesh, not wood or sand. Oh, gods.
He crouched among the wreckage of the ship's broken hold. Another exit lay forward of his position, on the far side, the origin of the more recent gunshots. Holding his breath, he tried to get a look around.
To his left, the hull where he'd entered showed a jagged scar of light, with more fissures periodically. Ahead and right...yes, he faintly made out the stronger light past the jumble of objects within. Pillars and heaps of crates, some of them densely packed, propped up the sagging deck enough to suggest a pathway.
To the port side, someone panted with the desperate catch of a serious wound. Flick, impaled by the iron barrel ring.
To the starboard side, the light shifted. Wood scraped, and someone moaned.
A soft, insistent voice ordered, "Be still, stay here." Devi. Precisely the sort of command she'd give.
The ghost of a laugh answered. "Copy that. Thanks."
The sounds of movement paused. To port, Flick's breathing turned to gasps, and a hideous wet sound. Someone else moved there as well. Someone bound to know where Nigel and Devi were hiding. But she had another ward, now. Monty, wasn't it.
The gunman on her side was a sniper, firing from a distance. On his, a mobile assassin. Nigel scrambled over the barrels and crates, grateful for his own lanky frame. His right biceps burned as he got moving, and every scrape or jostle only worsened the pain. A hail of gunshots pursued him, but the gunman fired blind from outside the hull. The wood groaned almost as if they truly were at sea. A barrel cracked under Nigel's weight and he levered his knee free from the broken staves.
On the starboard side, forward, he glimpsed movement again, her face in a shadowy profile, her hands pressing down. Deeper shadows spread toward the fractured wood where she had crawled inside, dragging the wounded man whose life she now held beneath her hands. Her expression couldn't be seen, but he felt, perhaps, their eyes met. Then the singing began.