The rain began to fall as they cleared the bay, a steady, rhythmic drumming against the heavy oak deck overhead that muffled the roar of the Atlantic. In the captain’s cabin, the world shrunk down to the amber glow of a single brass swinging lantern, the scent of cedar and sea salt, and the fierce, unyielding heat radiating between them.
Side by side on the small writing desk lay heavy, leather-bound volumes of Newtonian calculus and Vesalian anatomy, and stacked right beside them, several