I stared out across the dark hold. The faint strip of light was fading rapidly; it looked like we were going to spend a freezing night here. My bladder felt close to bursting – but I was having trouble forcing myself to let go. Every time I thought I’d finally accepted my body and all it could do to me, the underworld tugged the leash again. I’d accepted nothing. I’d had one brief glimpse beneath the surface, and now I wanted to bury everything I’d learned, to carry on as if nothing had changed.

I said, “The truth is whatever you can get away with.”

“No, that’s journalism. The truth is whatever you can’t escape.”

#

I was woken by torchlight in my face, and someone jagging an enzyme-coated knife through the polymer net which bound me to Kuwale. It was so cold it had to be early morning. I blinked and shivered, blinded by the glare. I couldn’t see how many people there were, let alone what weapons they carried, but I sat perfectly still while they cut me free, working on the assumption that anything less could earn me a bullet through the brain.

I was winched up in a crude sling, then left suspended in midair while three people clambered out of the hold on a rope ladder, leaving Kuwale behind. I looked around at the moonlit deck and – so far as I could see – open ocean. The thought of leaving Stateless behind chilled my blood; if there was any chance of help, it was surely back on the island.

They slammed the hatch closed, lowered me and untied my feet, then started hustling me toward a cabin at the far end of the boat. After some pleading, I was allowed to stop and piss over the side; for several seconds afterward, I was so overcome with gratitude that I would have been willing to dispatch Violet Mosala personally with my bare hands, if anyone had asked.

The cabin was packed with display screens and electronic equipment. I’d never been on a fishing boat before in my life, but this looked distinctly like overkill, when the average fleet could probably be run by a single microchip.

I was tied to a chair in the middle of the cabin. There were four people present; Witness had already matched two of them – numbered three and five in Kuwale’s gallery – but it came up blank on the others, two women about my age. I captured and filed their faces: nineteen and twenty.

I said, to no one in particular, “What was all the noise, before? I thought we’d run aground.”

Three said, “We were rammed. You missed all the excitement.” He was a Caucasian umale, heavily muscled, with Chinese characters tattooed on both forearms.

“Rammed by who?” He ignored the question, a little too coolly; he’d already said too much.