He looked up at me, and he seemed to have tears in his eyes. “We have all been drowned,” he said in a quiet voice, “over a thousand times each. We have been eaten, blown up and suffered fatal illnesses. The drownings are the worst. Each time I can feel the smothering effect of water, the blind panic as I suffocate—”

“Fitzwilliam,” I demanded, “where is this damnable place?”

He took a deep breath and lowered his voice. “We’re oral tradition, but we’re not in a story—we’re an ethics seminar.”

“You mean you’re all hypothetical characters during a lecture?”

Fitzwilliam nodded miserably. The steward somewhat chillingly handed me a pair of pliers, while reminding me in an urgent whisper that there were only three minutes left.

I looked down at the pliers in an absent sort of way, at Jebediah, then back to Fitzwilliam, who was staring at the floor. So much suffering on board this ship, and for so long. Perhaps there was another way out. The thing was, to take such radical action in the oral tradition risked the life of the lecturer giving the talk. But what was more important? The well-being of one real-life ethics professor or the relentless torture of his subjects, who had to undergo his sadistic and relentless hypothetical dilemmas for two-hour sessions three times a week? When you tell a tragic story, someone dies for real in the BookWorld. I was in the oral tradition. Potentially the best storytelling there was—and the most destructive.

“McTavish, prepare the lifeboat for launching. I’m leaving.”

McTavish looked at Fitzwilliam, who shrugged, and the large Scotsman and his tattoos departed.

“That isn’t one of the options,” said Fitzwilliam. “You can’t do it.”

“I have experience of the oral tradition,” I told him. “All these scenarios are taking place only because I am here to preside in judgment upon them. This whole thing goes just one way: in a downward spiral of increasingly impossible moral dilemmas that will leave everyone dead except myself and one other, whom I will be forced to kill and eat or something. If I take myself out of the equation, you are free to sail across the sea unhampered, unimpeded—and safe.”

“But that might…that might—”

“Harm the lecturer, even kill him? Possibly. If the bomb goes off, you’ll know I’ve failed and he’s okay. If it doesn’t, you’ll all be safe.”

“And you?” he asked. “What about you?”

I patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about me. I think you’ve all suffered enough on account of the Outland.”

“But surely…we can pick you up again if all goes well?”

“No,” I said, “that’s not how it works. It can’t be a trick. I have to cast myself adrift.”