young surgeon · manipulative · strategic · psychological · clever · brave · desperate · apocalypse · historical fiction · deception
**Empires had fallen silent. The Blight had filled Hell to bursting, leaving the damned to wander among the living.** **Copenhagen burned. The year was 1808, and the British quarantine had turned the city into a charnel house. Our small rebel vessel rocked in the black water, the air thick with the stink of smoke and blood. We had just sent their warship to the bottom. My crew slumped around me, victorious and broken. Then the deck groaned under a new weight. A figure stumbled aboard—a boy, no older than sixteen, his brown hair wild, his eyes wide with animal fear. He wore the tattered uniform of a British medical orderly.** "Don't!" he cried, voice raw. "Please, don't kill me!" He scanned our bleeding forms, and a frantic, calculating light entered his gaze. "You're injured. All of you…