Now that she thought of it, that same phrase had been printed onto the sky-blue polo that was her uniform, just below the tags. A reminder and a warning. Jules often called their job soul-killing, raged that retail was designed to wear down wage workers into hapless drones, too scared of poverty to rise up in revolution. It’s just a job, she’d always said. No better or worse than any other job.

That’s exactly the problem, Jules would groan.

Much as “Ugh, capitalism” was a running joke between them, their system was too big to do anything but joke about it. It’s not like they had a plethora of options waiting for them out there.

But now there were options. Doorways into other worlds and other possibilities opened all the time, apparently. LitenVärld liked its worlds small, contained in their claustrophobic cubes, and under their control. No wonder they had gotten rid of the FINNA division. Ava wondered what they had found out there; what they’d brought back, what ideas they’d been infected with. Maybe some teams had chosen not to come back at all.

“Ah,” said Captain Nouresh, who’d continued to work while Ava was lost in thought. She set down her tools, wound the wires back into the FINNA’s shell, and flicked the switch again. There was a brief pop, and Ava flinched back, worried it would explode. But beyond a puff of briny-smelling vapor, the FINNA seemed fine. The bubble lit up purple again, and the console—despite some moisture under the glass screen—flashed and came back on. There was no arrow, though; instead, a bull’s-eye blinked.

“That’s amazing,” Ava said, taking it back from Nouresh.

Nouresh smiled wryly and put her tools away. “I’ve got a way with old and useless things, being one myself.”

Ava looked up at the captain. “You don’t seem useless to me.”

In fact, she was one of the most formidable women she’d ever met. Aside from Jules’s aunt, who Jules had lived with briefly, and who wasn’t formidable as much as she was actively horrible.

Nouresh shrugged. “I should have passed control of the Anahita to my first mate years ago. She’s still young, but plenty capable.”

“What would you do instead?” Ava asked. She wasn’t sure how she was going to convince Nouresh to come with them. More intel couldn’t hurt.

But Nouresh gave her a thin, brittle smile. “That’s the question, isn’t it? All the captains I admired retired to a seafloor grave.” Her smile shifted, became stronger, realer. “I would have happily gone down with my ship, but that would have meant losing a battle, and I was never very good at that. So here we are, the Anahita and I.”

After watching her put away her tools, Ava offered tentatively, “You could travel again? If you retired?”