Gibbs woke up the way a man wakes up after doing something spectacularly stupid—slowly, painfully, and with the creeping suspicion that the universe had personally rearranged his bones while he slept.
His skull felt split straight down the middle.
He blinked at the ceiling—except it wasn't a ceiling. It was planks. Ship planks. The Pearl's planks. And he wasn't in his hammock.
He was on the floor.
He lay there for a moment, eyes narrowed, trying to remember last night's events.
Nothing moved except his tongue, which felt like it had been wrapped in old sailcloth.
"What…" he rasped, and then stopped, because the sound came out like a dying gull.
Last night was a smear of heat and rum and noise. He remembered sitting at a table. He remembered cursing Jack's name with a sincerity that could qualify as prayer. He remembered someone calling him uncle—and that didn't make any sense because he was not anyone's uncle, and he'd rather drown than be addressed like a kindly relative.
He pushed himself up on his elbows.
The room tilted. He froze, waited for it to stop spinning, then tried again more carefully. His ribs complained. His head tried to detach itself.
He found his boots. He did not remember taking them off. That felt like a bad sign. He also found a necklace—gold, heavy—half-draped over the edge of a crate like it had crawled there and died.
He stared at it.
Gold on the Pearl was a problem. Gold on the Pearl without Jack present was an omen.
Gibbs dragged himself upright and staggered toward the steps. Every plank creaked like it was laughing at him. He emerged onto the deck and immediately squinted, assaulted by sunlight.
Afternoon sun.
He frowned. That meant he'd lost hours. That meant something had happened while he'd been out cold, and he hadn't been there to steer the ship away from danger, or to hit Pintel when Pintel inevitably did something heroic and stupid. Definitely stupid.
"Pintel!" he called, voice raw.
No answer.
"Ragetti!"
Nothing.
That was wrong. The ship was never quiet when those two were conscious. If they weren't bickering, they were breathing too loudly. If they weren't breathing too loudly, Pintel was falling into the sea out of sheer habit.
Gibbs stepped forward and scanned the deck.
No Pintel. No Ragetti. No Jack. No Augur.
Just empty boards baking under the sky, the rigging slack in the heat, and the air so still it felt like the world had stopped moving for the sole purpose of mocking him.
A cold line ran down Gibbs' back that had nothing to do with weather.
He lurched to the railing and looked toward the port.
Nanohana.
Or what was left of it.
Smoke rose in thick columns, dark against the bright sky. Sections of the dock had been chewed apart—splintered timber, collapsed cranes, burned tents. The bustle that had been there yesterday—the shouting merchants, the perfume stench, the clatter of crates—was gone.
In its place: wreckage. Fire. Bodies moving in the distance like insects, too far to identify as guards or pirates, but moving with the frantic, ugly rhythm of a town being eaten alive.
Gibbs' mouth went dry again.
"What in the four seas…" he whispered.
He looked back over the Pearl as if answers might be hiding in the shadows of the sails.
All he found was silence.
Then, very faintly, a sound from the port—another boom, distant, followed by the echo of something collapsing.
Gibbs gripped the rail until his knuckles whitened.
"Must be Jack's fault," he muttered through his teeth, and it came out less like a name and more like an accusation.
Miles away, the desert tried to kill three people in three different ways.
Heat for the living. Sand for the proud. And humiliation for the stubborn.
Jack Sparrow walked as if the sun was merely a theatrical prop placed in the sky to flatter his silhouette. His coat was dusty, his hat sat at a confident angle, and his lips were cracked from thirst—but he still managed to move with a swagger that suggested he'd commissioned the desert personally.
Van Augur strode beside him, quiet, efficient, long rifle slung and eyes scanning the horizon.
Behind them—technically with them, though she would have stabbed either man for the phrasing—was the woman Jack insisted on calling "Croco."
She was on Augur's shoulder at first, carried like an inconvenient sack of violent pride.
She did not appreciate it.
"You will put me down," she said, voice low and sharp.
Augur adjusted his grip without comment.
"I will carve you open," she continued, "and pour sand into your lungs."
Jack glanced back over his shoulder, cheerful. "Threatening, yes. Very poetic. But can we save the murder for after I've had water?"
Crocodile's eyes narrowed. "You talk too much."
"That's my charm."