He wiggled his fingers. Thin scars crisscrossed his palm, tracks left by sunlight. The regrown skin was even darker than the rest of him. “There’s a reason I tan. Course now I’ll have to even out, or I’ll get blotchy.”

“Some leech you are. Isn’t your guys’ thing more a sort of deathly pallor? I knew girls on the club circuit who went through my salary in white pancake makeup every month.”

“Dumb. Scenesters imitating form over function. Shoreland suckers in the Old World, the ones with castles, drew lines from skin to status—if you were pale, it meant you could afford people to do things for you in the day. The paler you are, the faster you burn, so if you’re really pale it shows you’re not scared of the peasants-with-pitchforks routine. Which is all well and good until you forget to adjust your clocks for daylight savings time, some traveler you wanted to put the moves on pulls off the window blinds at dawn, and you go up like dryer lint.”

“Daylight what?”

“It’s an Old World thing. Are you ready to sail?”

Her pocket watch was ticking. “Yes. Everyone’s aboard?”

“Hold’s packed with your creepy friends.”

“Again with the creepy.” She waved at the crew scuttling, skittering, and lurching around the Kel’s Bounty deck. “What do you call these?”

“Sailors,” he said, and turned from her and raised his hand. “Cast off!”

In the rigging, a woman with the legs and abdomen of a spider shouted, “Aye!”

They made good time out of port—the Bounty’s wind walker filled their sail with a steady breeze, and Raz took the helm. “Promise to cover for me with the pilots’ guild. I don’t want to end up on their bad side.”

“As far as the port authority is concerned, none of this is happening.”

“They don’t like to be reminded some of us have been sailing this harbor since before they were born.” He spun the wheel, called for depth, adjusted again. Sighted on something she couldn’t see with his spyglass, collapsed it, let it dangle from his neck.

The ship swayed, and Cat almost fell, but caught herself with a lunge for the rail. “You have the edge of experience?”

“This spyglass of mine’s older than most pilots on the river.” He touched the symbols stamped into the bronze. “A relic of my vital days. Locals sail the harbor more often. If there’s a new wreck I don’t know about, if the sandbanks have shifted, if you put in port chains or kraken mines, we’re in trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“Can you swim?”

“In my own body, yes. If I put the Suit on, I sink.”

“I’ll try not to wreck us, then.”

“You weren’t doing that already?”

Fangs glinted in the moonlight as he grinned.