The Last Crossing - A Novella from the 'Reckoning Cycle'
⚫️ Gothic Paranormal Romance - TWC 10K
The Last Crossing follows the last voyage of the Esperança - a 1583 Portuguese dispatch caravel, bound for Mozambique in deteriorating weather.
It is a love story told in logbook entries and barometric readings, in the professional language two people use when they cannot say what they mean.
And it is a ghost story — because sixty years after the Cape takes the Esperança, a man is still standing at the stern window of ships that aren't his, waiting for a woman who hasn't found her way back yet.
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Download links and Content Warnings1 for the full work at the end.
I
The duty roster is wrong.
No, not wrong — incomplete. I’ve been working through it since before first light, the lamp still necessary, the dock sounds already starting above and around the hull. Tomás can take the dawn calculations when I’m below. He’s ready for that. The question is the afternoon watch in difficult conditions, whether I trust him to call the course correction himself or whether I need to be there for that still. He’s twenty. He has the instinct. I’ve been watching it develop for years and it’s there, solid, a thing you either have or don’t. Question is, do I trust it yet, or am I just hoping.
I jump when the knock comes. The door frame — his knuckles against wood, one sharp rap. Familiar after all this time.
I look up. He’s in the doorway, still in his dock clothes, the early light behind him. His eyes move across the cabin — me, the table, the lamp, the papers — and settle without settling. There’s something he wants to say, something I will not like, and is waiting to see if I’ll make it easier for him.
“You’re here early,” he says.
“There’s work.”
He comes in. Doesn’t sit immediately — moves to the small stern window, looks at the dock activity, looks at the water. The water is what gives him confidence, what calms him down.
I wait. Outside, the bosun is moving cargo. Voices carry through the hull, the ordinary productive chaos of departure morning. The Esperança — second of her name, rides easy at dock, patient, familiar beneath me.
“The commission estimates four to five months,” he says. Still looking outside. “Lisbon to Mozambique Island and back. Assuming the monsoon window holds.”
“I know the commission.”
“The dispatches are time-sensitive. Philip’s administrators won’t wait on a late caravel.” He turns then, looks at me properly. “We can’t afford to be delayed at the Cape.”
“I know.”
A silence. There’s more.
“I’ve been thinking,” he says, “that this particular crossing — the weather patterns this season, the deadline pressure — it might be—” He stops. Frowns. Tries again. “I’ve had a bad feeling since the commission arrived. I can’t explain it. I’ve tried and I can’t.”
I put the pen down. “What are you saying.”
“I’m saying it might be worth considering whether—” His eyes move to the table, my hands, the roster. Tomás’s name, written three times in the column I’ve been filling in. He looks at it for a moment. Something darkens his eyes that he controls before it takes his mouth as well. His eyes come back to mine. “There are other pilots available. Good ones. Tomás—”
“Don’t.”
“—is nearly ready, you’ve said so yourself. One more voyage as second—”
“I said don’t.”
“—and you could stay behind. Just this crossing. The Crown commission can accommodate—”
“Stop.” I stand. The cabin is too small for this — the ship is too small for this, that’s the problem with the Esperança, there is no room for anything to be large. “Seventeen years. I know this passage. You want to tell me, the morning we cast off, that I should stay behind.”
“I want to tell you I have a bad feeling and I would like you to be safe.” His voice is level. That’s the worst of it, how calm and reasonable he makes it sound — no anger, no command, just: this is what I want.
“My safety is not of your concern as a Captain.”
“No. But I’m not just—” He stops himself.
The word he didn’t say sits between us.
“Just what,” I say.
He looks at me. Four years on this ship, three before it on the nau. Seven years of watching each other across chart tables and quarterdecks and these small rooms. He looks at me the way he always looks at me when we are doing this — like he is trying to find the version of the thing he wants to say that I will actually hear.
“I need more time,” I say. Before he can find it.
“How much more time.” He seems to be genuinely asking. “Inês. It’s not as though everyone on this ship doesn’t already know. And if they’ve somehow managed not to notice in four years—” He pauses. Edging around something neither has acknowledged yet. “They won’t be able to stay blind for much longer.”
The lamp. The half-filled roster. His eyes, steady on mine now, saying and not saying.
I know what he means. I know exactly what he means and I will not confirm it and I will not deny it and I will not say the word and neither will he and that is — that has always been — the problem with us.
“I will not be managed,” I say. “If that is what this is—”
“That is not what this is.”
“Then what is it?”
He looks at me for a long moment. When he speaks his voice is sharper. “There is nothing more important to me than you. Not the commission. Not the dispatches. Not the Cape. You.” He crosses his arms, not in anger — holding himself from me. “That has nothing to do with how good a pilot you are. You know that.”
I do know that.
“Then let me do my job,” I say. “And trust me to do it well.”
His shoulders drop slightly — amusement, exhaustion, worry. He looks at me for another moment, then his eyes move to the water behind me, and I know this conversation is over.
For now.
“I’ll be on deck,” he says.
He goes. I hear his boots on the companionway, on the deck above, the bosun greeting him, the ordinary sounds of a departure morning resuming. The Esperança shifting slightly at her moorings, as eager for the open waters as I am.
I look at the roster.
Tomás’s name instead of mine, not everywhere, but often enough to give me some slack. The plan I hadn’t finished. The words I hadn’t found. The thing I’d been moving toward, slowly, in my own time, the way I work through everything — and he’d come in before I was ready and I’d reached for the sharpest words available instead.
He doesn’t know what he interrupted. He worries.
Above me, his voice, giving the order to cast off.
I pick up the pen. Open the logbook to the first blank page. Date. Position. Weather conditions. The departure entry, the same as every other departure entry in seventeen years of logbooks.
I write it all down. Steady hand. Even lines.
We sail.
The wind off the Tagus is northeast, steady. Good for clearing the bar. I note it and file it away, the first entry in the record I will keep until I can’t.
-
II
The barometer has dropped four marks since the morning watch. I know before I read it — the swell has been building on a fourteen-second interval since dusk, and the air has that flat quality, the iron taste at the back of the throat that means pressure dropping. I go below to confirm what I already know.
I record it. Close the instrument case. Open the logbook to yesterday’s entry, then today’s, then Rodrigo’s entry beside mine from this afternoon — his hand steady and certain, his numbers wrong. Not wildly, but enough. The kind of small mistake that compounds over days, that nudges a course three degrees off true until three degrees becomes a wall of rock in the dark.
I have not said so. Not in so many words.
The Esperança is small enough that I can hear him now, above me on deck, explaining something to the bosun in that careful way he has — patient, thorough, confident. Using small words and simple concepts. The bosun’s reply is shorter than it would be with me. Polite. He hates it.
I close the logbook.
Eleven crossings of this passage. I know the Cape the way I know my own hands — the convergence zone where the Atlantic and Indian meet and fight each other, the currents that run counter to every chart, the swell that shifts register when a system is building three days out. My father taught me to read weather the way other men’s fathers taught them to read scripture. Absolute. Non-negotiable.
He always wanted a boy. But I was a fast learner, and he was proud of that.
Four marks since the morning watch. The system is accelerating. The swell is running longer than yesterday — not much, enough that I notice it in my feet before I check the instruments.
I hear his boots on the companionway. His step — I know it from a thousand watches in weather good and terrible, from the rhythm of it at three in the morning when he comes to check the heading and ends up staying until dawn. My hands go still on the logbook. The lamp is behind him when he steps off the last stair — I get the shape of him before I can properly make out his face, the watch coat, the way he takes up a doorway. The hair on my nape rises. Eight years and it still does that.
He waits for me to acknowledge him, I wait for him to speak.
It was easier on the nau, there was always somewhere else to be on the big ship. A hundred crew, three decks. Distance was easy after a quarrel.
Coming back together, easy as well.
Twenty-eight crew on the Esperança. I have counted the ways you can avoid someone on a ship this size. There are not many. Everyone has been watching us not look at each other for three weeks, and everyone is pretending they haven’t.
He says, “The wind’s shifting.”
“Southwest,” I say. “I noted it at the last watch.”
A silence. The ship moves under us, the familiar creak of her hull, a sound that has kept me company for years and I will know until I die. He should ask me what I make of it. He doesn’t.
“Rodrigo thinks it’ll hold through to the Cape.”
I can feel a swell of disbelief wash through me. I snort. I can’t help it.
His eyes darken and I see it — the thing he’s doing, that thing that has been happening since West Africa. He’s asking me to agree, not to comment, not to advise.
Not anymore.
“The barometer says otherwise,” I lower my eyes.
He nods. Once. His hand spasms around the door frame making it squeak, but he remains impassive.
“I’ll note your reading,” he says, and goes back up.
In the logbook, the record that will outlast us if we are careful, and outlast us if we are not.
Rodrigo thinks it’ll hold.
I look at my numbers. I look at his. I close the logbook, and go back to watching the barometer fall.
-
To be Continued…
A NOTE ON THE RECKONING CYCLE
The Last Crossing is the prose half of something larger.
Dead Reckoning, the graphic novel that tells the next chapter of this story, is going to be published in Parallel Truths — a multi-genre anthology from Author Ventures, featuring work by Andy Weir, Eloisa James, JN Chaney, and others, illustrated by some of the finest artists working in comics today.
Sam Hart drew the Dead Reckoning pages, and I cannot get over how good it came out. (and this is just with inks!)
The Kickstarter campaign that brought this anthology into existence is about to go live as you read this, and there are perks for early backers.
Give it a look.
After the campaign closes, print copies will be available at Reader Nation (November 2026), where I will be, in person, and would be glad to sign yours.
The Reckoning Cycle continues beyond The Last Crossing and Dead Reckoning. I have written (and am still writing) more stories in this universe — prose, comics, and maybe even more. 😏
Content Warnings : The Last Crossing contains depictions of drowning and death at sea, a fatal storm sequence, and period-accurate professional danger. The romance between the lead characters develops slowly and does not resolve cleanly. Heat level: 2/5. The tension is the point.
I'm in love already. Downloading this as we speak!
It's so evident that you've done your research, this reads so much like I'm right there on that ship, like the sailors speak in nauticals. Great work!
Okay!!! I'm interested.