At first light the coconut palm that had saved them finally gave up and tipped over, releasing the boat to the sea. The outgoing tide carried the skiff and its sleeping passengers through a break in the reef to the open ocean.

Tuck, sitting chest deep in seawater in the bow, was dreaming of being lost in the desert when a flying fish smacked him in the side of the head. Startled, he reached up instinctively, as one might slap at a biting mosquito, and caught the fish in his right hand. He opened his eyes. In his mind he was still in the desert, dying of thirst, and the fact that he was now holding on to something that looked like a trout with wings seemed a cruel surrealist joke. He looked around, saw the boat, Kimi slumped in the back, ocean and sky, and nothing else—there was no land in sight.

He threw the fish at Kimi. It bounced off the navigator’s forehead and into the sea. Kimi screamed and sat up abruptly. Roberto—sunglasses akimbo—poked his head out the neck of Kimi’s dress and screeched at Tucker.

“What you do that for?” Kimi said.

“Nice piece of navigation,” Tuck said. Then he mocked Kimi’s broken English. “You smell storm? You see storm in sky?”

“Oh, you big-time pilot. Why you not check weather? What kind of dumb fuck American try to go two hundred miles in outboard, huh?”

“You told me it was no problem.”

“You paying Kimi big money. Not a problem.”

“Well, it’s a fucking problem now, isn’t it?”

Kimi stroked Roberto’s head to calm him. “Stop yelling. You scare Roberto.”

“I don’t care about Roberto. We’re half-sunk in the middle of the Pacific and we don’t have a motor. I’d say we have a problem.”

Kimi stopped ministering to Roberto and looked up. “No motor?” He turned and looked back at the empty motor board. There were marks where the clamps had raked across it as the motor pulled off in the tumble. He turned back to Tuck and grinned sheepishly. “Whoops.”

“We’re dead,” Tuck said.

Kimi looked back again where the motor should have been, just to make sure that it was still gone. “I ask that man, ‘Is motor on good?’ He say, ‘Oh yes, is clamp on very tight.’ I pay him good money and he lie. Oh, Kimi is very mad.”

Roberto barked in agreement.

“Stop it!” Tucker shouted. Roberto ducked into Kimi’s dress again. “We’ve got to get some of this water out of here. We have no motor. We can’t go anywhere. We’re adrift, lost…”

“Alive,” Kimi interrupted. “I get you out of typhoon alive and you just yell and say bad things. I quit. You get new navigator. Roberto say you mean, nasty, Chevy-driving, milk-drinking, American dog fucker.”

“I don’t drink milk,” Tuck said. Ha! Won that round.

“That what he say.”

“Roberto does not talk!”

“Not to you, dog fucker. You no…” Kimi paused in mid-rant and retrieved the coffee can, which had been tied to the boat with a string, and started furiously scooping water out of the boat. “You right. Now we bail.”

“What?” Tuck looked up to see Kimi was looking, wide-eyed, out to sea. Tuck followed his gaze to a spot twenty yards in front of the boat where a triangular fin was describing slow arcs in the swells.

“Hurry,” Kimi shouted. “He coming in.”

Tucker reached for his pack, causing the bow to dip under the water by a foot. Before he could adjust his weight to counterbalance the boat, the shark came over the gunwale, snapping its jaws like a man-eating puppet.

Tuck stood up to escape the jaws and the bow lurched deeper underwater. The shark slid into the boat as Tuck went backward over the side.

Fear bolted through his body as if the water had been electrified.

He wanted to move in all directions at once. He kicked hard and came up a few feet from the boat to see the shark slide back into the water.

“Get in boat!” Kimi screamed. He was standing with his feet wide, trying to keep the boat from capsizing.

Tuck kicked so hard that he raised out of the water to the waist, then he fell toward the boat, catching the gunwale with one hand. Kimi shifted his weight to counterbalance and Tuck pulled himself in just as something hit his foot. He jerked his foot so hard he nearly went out of the boat on the opposite side, then he twisted in time to see the shark sliding down into the water with his shoe in its mouth.

“Behind you!” Kimi screamed.

Another shark rose up at Tuck’s back. He swung around and punched it on the snout as hard as he could, taking the skin off of his knuckles on the shark’s sandpaper skin. The shark slid away.

The motion in the bow caused the stern to dip underwater and the next attack came at Kimi. He tossed Roberto into the air as the shark came into the boat. Roberto spread his wings and soared into the sky. Kimi reached down and came up with the rubber fuel line.

Tucker looked for anything they could use as a weapon, then remembered the folding knife he had put in his pocket the night before. It was still there.

Kimi was slapping the shark with the rubber hose and backing his way up onto the huge gas tank that made up the midsection of the boat. Tuck opened the knife, then lunged forward at the navigator. “Kimi!”

Kimi reached back and Tuck fit the handle of the knife into his hand. The shark had worked half of its nine-foot body into the boat. Its tail thrashed at the water to power the shark up onto the gas tank. Kimi scrambled backward. Roberto swooped and screeched in the air above.

Kimi’s right foot found purchase on the screw cap of the gas tank and he sat up. Tuck thought he was going to strike the shark with the knife, but instead he cut the gas line and squirted a stream of gas into the shark’s gaping mouth. The shark thrashed and slid off the side of the boat.

Kimi brandished the knife in the air. “Yeah, fuckface, you run away. That not taste so sweet as Kimi, huh?” He fell back onto the gas tank and took a deep breath. “We show that shark who the boss.”

Tuck said, “Kimi, there’s more.” He pointed to set of fins approaching from the stern.

The storm had been easy on the Shark People. A little thatch lost from a roof here and there, a cookhouse blown over, some breadfruit and coconuts stripped from the trees, but not enough to cause hardship. Some seawater had washed into the taro patch, but only time would tell if it was enough to kill the crop. The Shark People went slowly about the business of cleaning up, the women doing most of the work while the men sat in the shade of the men’s house, drinking alcoholic tuba and pretending to discuss important religious matters. Mainly they were there to pass the heat of the day and get good and drunk before dinner.

Malink, the high chief of the Shark People, was late rising. He awoke shivering and afraid, trying to figure out how to interpret a strange dream. He rolled off of his grass sleeping mat, then rose creakily and ambled out of the hut to relieve himself at the base of a giant breadfruit tree.

He was a short, powerfully built man of sixty. His hair was bushy and gone completely white. His skin, once a light butterscotch, had been burned over the years to the dark brown of a tarnished penny. Like most of the Shark men, he wore only a cotton loincloth and a wreath of fresh flowers in his hair (left there by one of his four daughters while he slept). The image of a shark was tattooed on his left pectoral muscle, a B-26 bomber on the other.

He went back into the hut and pulled a steel ammo box out of the rafters. Inside lay a nylon web belt with a holster that held a portable phone, his badge of leadership, his direct line to the Sorcerer. The only time he had ever used it was when one of his daughters had come down with a fever during the night. He had pushed