The one thing I couldn’t fix was how I felt on the inside, which was pretty fucking awful. I’d never experienced anything like the killing frenzy that overcame me, not even in the worst moments with the Harps, on the most violent and terrifying of missions. And I had to admit something to myself that I’d been ignoring a long time: Hell wasn’t just getting to me; it had already gotten to me.

The realization made me cold all over. By the time I stumbled into Riprash’s loading operation, I was shivering like someone in the final stages of malaria.

The ogre didn’t bother to ask me what had happened. As soon as he saw my bloody, dripping clothes, he just threw me over his shoulder and carried me up the gangplank to his cabin. He and Gob washed out the worst of my wounds, then bandaged me with comparatively soft cloth and gave me water to drink. I had just enough strength to marvel at how much like actual life it was living in Hell. I could bleed here. I could go mad here.

I could also sleep here. I fell into feverish dark.

When I woke up I was alone. I got to my feet, shaky as a junkie just gone through withdrawal, and climbed to Nagging Bitch’s top deck. It was dark except for the distant red glow of the afterlights. Riprash was just sending home the last of his stevedores.

“Good you’re up,” he rumbled, “’cause the boy and I are going out, and I was about to wake you up to tell you. Didn’t want you fretting when you woke up and found us gone.”

“Gone?” I wasn’t crazy with anger any more, but I still had a healthy dose of Hell-induced paranoia. “Gone where?”

Riprash looked around carefully then leaned toward me. “Fellowship meeting,” he said quietly. “It’s our last night in port, so I’d feel bad if I missed it.”

I’d already attended one of Riprash’s meetings, and as interesting (and even touching) as it had been, I didn’t need to go to another. Still, I would be waiting by myself on the ship, perhaps for hours, knowing all the time that Eligor’s household must be looking hard for whoever had killed the two bodyguards. I hoped if they had a way to slip them into new bodies, it would at least take a while, because I was pretty sure that Candy had recognized me at the end. No, the more I considered it, the less I wanted to stay anywhere alone.

“I’ll go with you.”

Riprash, like most religious folk, was pleased. “Good. Good! I’ll tell Gob. He’ll be right pleased. He’s really taken to the Lifters, you know.”