Chapter 21
Kazashita
Iwas hauling crates onto a merchant vessel when the world exploded.
The sound hit first—a deafening BOOM that seemed to shake the air itself. Then the shockwave, a physical force that knocked me back a step.
I dropped the crate I was holding, barely registering as it crashed to the dock.
Every head turned toward the harbor.
A ship—three berths down from where I stood—erupted in flames.
Black smoke billowed up, thick and oily, an angry smear against the crystalline sky.
The wind carried it toward the city. This wasn’t the slow burn of an accidental fire, but an instant conflagration.
One moment, the vessel had been whole. The next, its midsection was a roiling ball of orange and black.
Debris rained down.
Chunks of burning wood splashed into the water.
Men screamed and shouted—some on the ship, some on nearby vessels, some on the docks.
“Fire!” someone yelled. “FIRE!”
Chaos erupted.
Sailors and dockhands raced in every direction. Some toward the burning ship, others away from it. Workers grabbed buckets, forming a desperate line to the water’s edge. They passed full buckets hand over hand, throwing water onto the flames.
It was useless. Completely useless.
The fire was too large, too hot, too fast. It devoured the ship like a living thing. Sails became torches. Masts collapsed, crashing down in showers of sparks. The hull cracked with sounds like thunder.
The bucket line shifted, aiming their relief at nearby ships, hoping to keep the madness contained.
I stood frozen, watching the destruction.
Men were still aboard as the fires raged.
I could see them—dark smudges moving through smoke, some trying to fight the blaze, others trying to abandon ship.
One man jumped from the railing, his clothes aflame.
He disappeared into the water below. His screams did not stop when he hit the water.
They continued—high and terrible and inhuman—until suddenly they cut off.
Whether he drowned or the shock took him, I didn’t know, but the sound stayed with me, echoing in my skull.
The fire spread to the rigging, then to the deck, consuming everything it touched.
I recognized one of the men in the bucket brigade—Goro—a dock worker like me, perhaps a decade older, with a missing tooth and a tendency to share his lunch when he noticed someone going hungry.
He had given me half a rice ball just yesterday.
He stood third in line, passing buckets with desperate efficiency, his face streaked with sweat and soot.
I could taste the smoke now—acrid and wrong.
“Back! Get back!” the harbormaster was shouting, waving his arms. “The whole thing’s going to go!”
As if in answer, another explosion rocked the ship, smaller than the first but still violent. Something in the hold—gunpowder, maybe, or oil—igniting in the inferno. The shockwave hit the bucket brigade.
Men stumbled. One fell into the water.
The ship listed and then groaned.
The fire had eaten through crucial supports, compromised its structure. Men screamed and leaped, abandoning any pretense of fighting. Some made it to nearby vessels, while others hit the water and thrashed, trying to swim clear.
The bucket brigade scattered, finally seeing the futility of their efforts. Goro ran with the others, his bucket clattering to the dock.
I watched, numb, as the ship—a three-masted merchant vessel that had been whole and functional moments ago—died before my eyes.
The flames reached the waterline. Steam hissed as fire met water. The hull, weakened beyond saving, split with a sound like the world cracking apart. The bow rose. The stern sank. Water rushed in through the breach, swallowing the fire, swallowing the ship.
In minutes—mere minutes—the last of the vessel slipped below the surface.
The harbor churned as bubbles broke the surface, the last gasp of the dying beast. Debris floated—burned wood, torn canvas, objects I could not identify.
And then there were bodies.
One floated face-down near the dock, his uniform marking him as crew. His back was charred and barely recognizable as human. The water around him was dark with soot and ash.
Another body drifted farther out, this one a woman—one of the ship’s cooks, perhaps, or a passenger—her hair spread around her like seaweed.
A third bobbed in the current, and my stomach lurched.
I recognized the man. He was one of the sailors I’d seen from the tavern, one of the officers who had sat while the hooded figure spoke of attacks and targets and commitment to a cause I still couldn’t name.
The man’s eyes were open, staring at nothing, his fine clothes were scorched, and his mouth hung slack in an expression of surprise, as if death had come too quickly to process.
You are either with us or you become targets.
He had been with them, yet they killed him anyway. Or perhaps the ship itself was the target, and he was considered an acceptable loss, collateral damage in a war that did not care about individuals.
I tore my gaze away and choked down bile.
Hideous smoke continued to rise from where the ship had been, marking its grave.
Near the bucket brigade’s abandoned position, someone pulled bodies from the water.
Goro was there, helping drag a burned man onto the dock.
The man was alive—barely, his skin red and blistered, weeping fluid.
He kept screaming, a thin, contemptuous sound like an animal in a trap.
I knew I would hear his cries in my dreams for many nights to come.
“Get a physician!” someone shouted.
But there were too many injured, too many dying, and I doubted there were enough physicians in Bara to tend to them all, even if they came.
Goro looked up and saw me watching. His expression was hollow and haunted in ways I never imagined the friendly man could appear. He shook his head slowly, as if to say, This is madness. This is all madness. Then he turned back to the burned man and tried to offer what comfort he could.
A wet shroud of silence fell over the docks, smothering and constricting rather than comforting. It was that strange, hollow silence that followed violence. Men gaped, trying to process what they had just witnessed.
Then the shouting began.
Questions. Accusations. Panic.
“What in the hells happened?”
“. . . an accident?”
“I heard . . . like gunpowder going up—”
“Sabotage! It had to be sabotage!”
Movement erupted across the harbor, not the organized chaos of fighting a fire, but something more frantic. More desperate.
On the ship berthed next to the destroyed vessel, sailors were already casting off lines. Its captain stood on deck, shouting orders, his face pale, his eyes burning brighter than the flames had moments ago.
“Get those moorings loose! Now!”
A sailor tried to protest, “But we’re not fully loaded—”
“I don’t care! Fucking cast off or swim home!”
The crew scrambled, and within minutes, the ship was pulling away from the dock, its sails only half raised, leaving cargo and revenue behind in their haste to escape.
Two berths over, another captain did the same, his vessel lurching away from the dock with an urgency that nearly capsized a rowboat in its path.
“Where are you going?” the dockmaster shouted up at the fleeing ship.
“South!” the captain called back. “Away from this cursed city! Away from your fucking war!”
A third ship followed. Then a fourth.
I watched the exodus, as captains who had been unloading cargo or taking on supplies now abandoned everything.
Some left crew members behind on the docks, men who had been ashore when the decision was made.
Those men stood staring after their departing ships, suddenly stranded in a city that was eating itself alive.
“Cowards!” someone yelled after them.
But more voices joined in agreement with the fleeing captains: “This harbor isn’t safe anymore!”
“Nothing in Bara is safe!”
A fight broke out near one of the departing ships as a merchant who had been waiting for cargo tried to board, claiming he had paid for passage. The remaining crew beat him back with clubs. He fell into the water, and no one moved to help him.
The dockmaster shouted himself hoarse, trying to restore order, trying to stop the ships from leaving, but he held no authority here, not anymore. The captains answered only to their own survival.
By the time the sun had moved a hand’s width across the sky, seven ships had fled the harbor. Seven fewer vessels meant seven fewer sources of work, seven fewer chances for men like me to earn the coin we desperately needed.
I saw it in the faces of the other dockworkers. The calculation. The dawning horror.
Fewer ships meant fewer jobs and less money. Less food.
The harbor’s lifeblood flowed outward, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it.
“Back to work!” the dockmaster was shouting, his voice cracking. “All of you! These ships won’t load themselves!”
But half the workers had already disappeared, either fleeing like the ships, or standing paralyzed by what they had witnessed. Or, like Goro, still trying to tend to the burned and dying scattered across the dock.