Suddenly it was dawn, and in a corner of the sea wall, where a water-stair went down to what was now new-washed empty sand, grey in the thin light of dawn, she came upon three shadow boys. Running on one-shot cultivars—the throwaway 24-hour kind, all tusks and rank-smelling muscles, sleeveless denim jackets, sores from bumping against things in an unconsidered manner—they were squatting in the dawn wind playing the Ship Game on a blanket, grunting as the bone dice tumbled and toppled, every so often exchanging high-speed datastreams like squeals of rage. Complex betting was in progress, less on the game than the contingencies of the world around it: the flight of a bird, the height of a wave, the colour of the sunlight. After every cast of the dice they pawed and fought pantomimically and tossed folding money at one another, laughing and snuffling.

“Hey,” they said when Seria Mau fetched up. “Here, kitty kitty!”

There was nothing they could do to her. She was safe with them. It was like having grown-up brothers. For a moment or two they threw the dice at blinding speed. Then one of them said, without looking up: “You don’t get bored, being not real that way?”

They couldn’t play for laughing at that.

Seria Mau watched the game until a bell rang softly on the White Cat and drew her away.

As soon as she was gone, two of the shadow boys turned on the third and cut his throat for cheating, then, overcome by the pure existential moment, cradled his head in the warm golden light as he smiled softly up at nothing, bubbling his life out all over them like a benediction. “Hey you,” they comforted him, “you can do it all again. Tonight you’ll do it all again.”

Up in the parking lot, Seria Mau sighed and turned away.

“You see?” she told her empty ship. “It always comes to this. All the fucking and the fighting, it all comes to nothing. All the pushing and the shoving. All the things they give each other. If for a moment I thought—” Could she still cry? She said, apropos of nothing: “Those beautiful boys in the sunlight.” This made her remember what she had said to the Nastic commander, out there in the shadow of his stupidly big ship. It made her remember the package she had bought from Uncle Zip, and what she intended to do with it. It made her recall Uncle Zip’s offer. She opened a line to him and said:

“OK, tell me where this Billy Anker guy is.” She laughed, and, mimicking the tailor’s manner, added, “Also his present ambitions.”

Uncle Zip laughed too. Then he let his face go expressionless.

“You waited too long for that free offer,” he informed her. “I changed my mind about that.”