Chapter 4: The Tingling Sense
Three days at Martha's inn taught me the rhythm of Tortuga.
Dawn brought the worst of it—drunks stumbling home, fights spilling into the streets, the occasional body that needed stepping over. By midmorning, the town settled into something almost peaceful. Merchants hawked their wares. Ships loaded cargo. Normal business, if you ignored the pistols on every hip.
By evening, chaos returned.
I'd graduated from barrel-hauling to serving drinks at the Faithless Bride, a tavern three streets down from Martha's place. The owner, a gap-toothed Frenchman named Pierre, paid in food and a corner to sleep. Better than nothing.
Tonight, the Bride was packed.
I moved through the crowd with a tray of rum cups, ears open. Information was currency here, and I was collecting every coin I could find.
"—Navy's getting bold. Saw them burn a sloop off Jamaica last week—"
"—hear about that Spanish galleon? Gold bars stacked to the ceiling, they say—"
"—mad captain Sparrow, got himself marooned again. Third time this year—"
My feet stopped.
Sparrow.
The name hit me like a physical blow. I'd been waiting for it, listening for any mention of the main players from the films. Here it was. Confirmation that Jack Sparrow was active, alive, somewhere in the Caribbean.
Pre-Curse of the Black Pearl, I calculated. The events haven't started yet. I have time.
Time for what, exactly, I wasn't sure.
I delivered the rum and retreated to the kitchen, processing. The timeline was taking shape. Jack was still building his reputation, still scheming his way toward the Pearl. Barbossa's crew was probably already cursed, wandering the seas as undead pirates.
And I was here, in the middle of it all, with powers I didn't understand and a connection to this world I couldn't explain.
The crash came from the main room.
I pushed through the kitchen door to find chaos erupting. Two tables had overturned. A card game had gone wrong—accusations of cheating, from what I could hear—and now a dozen men were throwing punches while the rest of the tavern scrambled for cover or jumped in to join.
Stay out of it, I told myself. Not your fight.
A bottle sailed past my head and shattered against the wall.
Close. Too close.
I ducked behind an overturned table and tried to find a path to the door. The fight was spreading, consuming the room like fire. Men grappled. Chairs flew. Someone screamed as a knife found flesh.
The tingling started at the base of my skull.
Left.
I threw myself sideways without thinking. A chair crashed through the space where my head had been, wielded by a man with murder in his eyes.
Right.
I stepped right. A knife whistled past, close enough to feel the wind of its passage.
Down.
I dropped. A bottle passed over me and exploded against the bar.
The tingling guided me through the chaos like a compass through a storm. Every surge of danger came with a direction, a warning, a split-second of notice that let me move just in time. I didn't understand it. I didn't question it. I just moved.
When the fight finally burned itself out—broken men groaning on the floor, Pierre screaming about damages, the survivors stumbling toward the door—I stood untouched.
Not a scratch.
I looked around at the carnage. At least six men were bleeding. One wasn't moving at all. And I had walked through the heart of it without a single blow landing.
That wasn't luck.
I found an abandoned bottle of rum—half full, miraculously unbroken—and retreated to my corner. My hands shook as I poured.
The danger sense. That's what I'd been calling it. But now I understood it better. It wasn't just a warning. It was directional. It told me where the danger was coming from and how to avoid it.
The rum burned going down. Pleasant heat spreading through my chest.
I closed my eyes and tried to remember every detail. The tingling at the base of my skull. The pressure that seemed to push me away from harm. The split-second warnings that came just in time.
Some kind of combat precognition, I thought. Seeing threats before they arrive.
How far ahead could I sense? A second? Two? It had been enough tonight, but what about faster attacks? What about guns?
I didn't want to test that theory.
[PIERRE THE BARKEEP]
Pierre watched the young man in the corner nursing his stolen rum.
Something wrong with that one. Pierre had seen the fight—had ducked behind the bar and watched it unfold through a gap in the bottles. The stranger had moved through the violence like smoke through fingers. Untouchable.
Nobody was that lucky.
Pierre had been in Tortuga for twenty years. He'd seen witch-doctors and voodoo priests. He'd heard stories of curses and blessings, of men who couldn't die and women who could kill with a look.
The Caribbean was full of strange things.
This one, though... this one felt different. Not evil. Just wrong. Like a note in a song that didn't quite fit.
Pierre resolved to watch him more closely. And maybe, when the opportunity came, to point him somewhere else.
Some troubles were better passed along.
The conversation drifted through the room as Pierre's serving girls cleaned up broken glass.
"—spotted Sparrow at the Anchor, other end of town—"
"—two days ago, maybe three—"
"—recruiting, they say. Got some venture in mind—"
I sat up straighter. Jack was here. In Tortuga. Not just a name in a story but a physical presence somewhere in this town.
And as the sailors talked, something strange happened.
A pull.
Not the tingling of danger. Something different. A tugging sensation in my chest, faint but insistent, pointing toward... somewhere. A direction I couldn't name but knew instinctively.
What the hell?
I stood, leaving the rum behind. The pull didn't change. It just was—a constant pressure, like a compass needle swinging north.
Pointing toward the other end of Tortuga.
Where Jack Sparrow had been seen.
Coincidence, I told myself. Has to be.
But I didn't believe it. Not in a world where I could sense danger before it arrived. Not in a world where I could die and come back.
I was connected to Jack Sparrow somehow. I just didn't know why.
Tomorrow, I would find out.
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