He roams about all the cabins. Nothing is left on the shelves, neither books nor medicine. They have taken them all with them. The cabin walls, floors and the patient’s beds have blood splashes all over them. Dalia had told him to look for bottles of distilled ginger, yarrow, raisins, peppermint or cinnamon powder. She had said they all looked alike and the bottles are usually labelled. Mart has taken all the medicine, probably needs them to treat his wounded soldiers after the battles, and where better than Parsana to find so much free medicine? He sees a small black bottle, rolled down by a trunk in one of the cabins. He picks it up. The bottle doesn’t have a cork and a label but there is little liquid left at the bottom of it. He looks around to find the cork but the trunk seems more appealing. The trunk door opens after Tirad punches it a few times. It appears to be empty in the dim light of the cabin. Yet he sits down and rolls his torch inside the knee-high trunk. The black bottom of the trunk seems bulged. He stretches his hand and takes out the shark leather bag.

He looks inside. There are a few medicine bottles, a comb and a small mirror and some papers in the bag. He looks at the papers. One of them has the picture of a crushed snake on it, drawn with charcoal. Tirad feels shocked to see his own drawing…the last days of the Saviour Island, his teaching classes and the dead body of the little water snake comes rushing to his mind. He couldn’t forget the snake until he had sketched it on paper. This bag must have belonged to Lealy! No one else would carry Tirad’s drawings with them. Tirad hangs the bag on his shoulder and looks around the room more carefully. There are few drops of blood on the planks beside the trunk. He can’t find anything useful. He searches the rest of the cabins. The sun has risen and the abandoned Parsana Ship looks even more vacant and dead under the early morning light. He goes back to the deck, climbs down the ladder and jumps to his boat from the platform.

Dalia confirms. This is indeed Lealy’s bag and even though the bottles are just marked with ticks and crosses, Dalia can tell which ones can be good for her from the smell of the liquids inside. She has never before seen the black bottle Tirad had found by the trunk and says it looks suspicions. She puts it aside and asks Tirad to bring her some water to moisten her head. Tirad wants to go to the central ship. Even though he knows Mart has left nothing behind, but he hopes to find some of Armina’s books. The medical books might be useful to Mart, but he probably doesn’t have any use for Armina’s and might have left them behind. Dalia doesn’t object. She seems better, physically, but having lost her baby has made her look like Asin: depressed and down. Tirad brings her some water. She washes her head and body, takes some medicine from a bottle and lies down covering herself with a blanket, pretending to go to sleep. Tirad looks at her as he goes out of the cabin. She has curled up in a foetal position and is crying slowly under the blanket. He goes back to her, takes her in his arms, kisses her and asks her to forgive him. He doesn’t know why he is asking for forgiveness. He shares the same loss and pain as Dalia does, it was his baby too. If Tirad couldn’t take back the semi-dolphin baby, Dalia was to blame for having given it to them in the first place. There is no use in blaming each other. He just wants her to calm down. He picks up the suspicious black bottle and takes it out with him and throws it into the water on his way. He swims to the platform of the central ship.