Chapter 2: The Drowned Man
The fist missed my jaw by an inch.
I didn't know how I'd dodged it. One moment the big man's knuckles were filling my vision, the next I was stumbling sideways, my body moving on instincts that didn't belong to me.
The tingling at my skull intensified—left, left, move left—and I threw myself that direction just as a knife cut through the air where I'd been standing.
"Fast little shit," one of them snarled.
I wasn't fast. I was terrified and confused and operating on something I didn't understand. But my body kept moving, kept responding to that electric sensation that screamed danger before it arrived.
It wasn't enough.
The third man caught me from behind. Arms like ship cables wrapped around my chest, pinning my arms to my sides. I kicked, struggled, tried to break free—
The big man stepped close. His breath smelled like rotted fish.
"Marcus died hard," he said. "Reckon you should too."
The knife went into my stomach.
The pain was unlike anything I'd experienced. Sharp first, then spreading like fire, then cold. So cold. I looked down at the blade, at the blood soaking through my shirt, and thought with strange clarity: This is how I die. Again.
He twisted the knife.
I screamed. Or tried to. My lungs were filling with something wet.
Then they dropped me.
I hit the tavern floor and watched my blood pool across the dirty wood. People were shouting. Someone said something about the Navy, about getting out before the watch came. Footsteps retreated.
The ceiling swam above me.
This isn't fair, I thought. I just got here. I don't even know why I'm here.
The cold spread from my gut to my chest to my limbs. My heartbeat slowed. The sounds of the tavern faded to whispers, then to silence.
Then nothing at all.
[ELENA THE FISHWIFE]
Elena had been gutting fish on the dock when the body came up.
She'd seen drowning men before. They usually floated face-down, bloated after a few days, picked at by crabs and small fish. This one was different.
He rose from the water like the sea herself was pushing him up. Naked as the day he was born, coughing and retching, scrabbling at the dock pilings with desperate hands.
Elena dropped her knife.
The man—young, dark-haired, with a fresh scar on his stomach that looked like a stab wound—dragged himself onto the dock boards and collapsed. He lay there shaking, seawater pooling around him, and Elena had the strangest thought.
He came from the deep. But he's breathing.
She crossed herself and backed away. There was witch-work in that. Sea magic. The kind of thing that got men and women burned in other parts of the world.
But she was a practical woman, and practical women didn't burn anyone. She watched him for a moment longer—watched him curl in on himself, watched his body shake with sobs or shivers or both—and then she turned back to her fish.
Whatever he was, whatever had brought him up from the water, it wasn't her business.
The sea kept her own secrets.
I couldn't stop shaking.
The dock boards pressed against my bare skin, rough and warm from the sun, and I couldn't stop shaking. My hands kept going to my stomach, pressing against the scar where the knife had been.
I had died.
I had died.
The memories were knife-sharp: the pain, the cold, the way everything had faded to nothing. I'd felt my heart stop. I'd felt my lungs fill with blood. There had been a moment—brief, eternal—of absolute darkness.
And then the water.
I'd woken in the shallows of the harbor, my body reconstructing itself from salt water and foam. I'd felt my lungs clear, felt my wound close, felt life pour back into me like someone filling an empty vessel.
How is this possible?
I sat up slowly. A few dockworkers gave me strange looks but kept their distance. A naked man climbing out of the harbor wasn't the strangest thing Tortuga had seen, apparently.
No, not Tortuga. I wasn't there yet. This was some smaller port, the one I'd found when I first woke up.
I looked down at my stomach. The scar was pale pink, weeks old despite being less than an hour since the stabbing. My body bore no other marks of the violence.
I had come back from the dead.
The sea brought me back.
I thought of the movies again. Davy Jones. The Flying Dutchman. The Locker where dead souls went. In this world, the ocean wasn't just water—it was territory, governed by forces beyond human understanding.
Had I made some kind of deal? Was I cursed? Blessed? Both?
I needed answers. I needed clothes. I needed to get out of this port before those three bastards came back to finish what they'd started.
Something hit me in the chest. I looked down to see a tattered piece of sailcloth at my feet.
A dockworker was walking away, laughing. "Cover yourself, man!"
I wrapped the cloth around my waist and stood on legs that shook like a newborn deer's. The sun was lower than it had been—maybe forty-five minutes since my death, based on the position. Whatever resurrection I'd experienced, it wasn't instantaneous.
First things first. Clothes. Then transportation. Then answers.
I started walking.
[TOMAS THE DOCKHAND]
"You see that?" Tomas grabbed his friend's arm. "That man. The naked one."
"What about him?"
"I saw him get stabbed in the tavern. Jorge and his boys, collecting on some debt." Tomas lowered his voice. "They killed him, Pedro. Stuck him like a pig. He was dead on the floor when I ran out."
Pedro looked at the retreating figure—scrawny, wrapped in sailcloth, walking toward the edge of town like a man with somewhere to be.
"Looks alive to me."
"That's what I'm saying!" Tomas crossed himself. "Dead men don't walk. Not unless they've got the devil in them."
Pedro squinted at the stranger. "Could be you saw wrong. Dark in that tavern. Lots of blood makes things look worse than they are."
"I know what I saw."
But even as he said it, Tomas felt doubt creeping in. Maybe the knife hadn't gone as deep as he'd thought. Maybe the blood had been exaggerated by the low light. The alternative—that a dead man had climbed out of the harbor—was too terrible to contemplate.
He went back to his work and tried not to think about it.
The Caribbean was full of strange things. Better not to look too closely at any of them.
I found clothes in the most practical way possible: I stole them.
A clothesline behind a small house yielded a pair of pants and a shirt only slightly too large. I left the sailcloth in their place—not exactly a fair trade, but better than nothing. Guilt was a luxury I couldn't afford.
The sun was setting by the time I found a knife. This one I didn't steal; I found it abandoned in an alley, probably dropped during a fight. The blade was rusty but sharp enough.
I sat against a wall and tried to think.
Facts. Start with facts.
Fact one: I had transmigrated into this body after dying in my original world. The previous owner was dead, killed in some sort of fight that I'd gotten flashes of during my first hour awake.
Fact two: I had died again—stabbed in a tavern—and come back. The ocean had literally reformed my body from seawater.
Fact three: Before I'd been stabbed, I'd felt something. A tingling sensation at the back of my skull, like a warning. I'd dodged the first punch because of it.
That sensation... it felt like the kind of thing that should have saved my life. If I'd understood it better, listened to it more carefully, maybe I could have avoided the knife entirely.
Some kind of danger sense? Like Spider-Man?
In a world where magic was real, it wasn't the craziest idea.
I looked at my hands again. The calluses. The rough skin. The body of a sailor, complete with muscle memory I didn't have access to—yet.
What else can I do?
I spent the next hour testing theories. I couldn't fly. I wasn't super strong. When I cut my palm with the knife, I bled like anyone else and it hurt like a bastard. No regeneration, apparently—at least not while I was alive.
Only when I died.
The resurrection was tied to salt water. I was sure of that. The moment I'd felt life returning, I'd been in the harbor. The ocean had made me, rebuilt me from nothing.
So if I die far from the sea, do I stay dead?
I didn't want to test that theory.
Night fell. I found a spot under an overturned boat and curled up to sleep. Tomorrow, I would head for Tortuga. It was the obvious destination—a place with no law, where a man with no past could find work and information.
And maybe, if I was lucky, I'd start to understand what the hell I was doing in this world.
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