Tirad was right. Mart had swept the central ship as well. He must have cleared the western ship too: the storage cabins for food and fuel. He goes down three levels to Armina’s cabin floor, even though he has no hope of finding anything there, but having come all this way, he just wants to make sure. Armina’s books are gone. There are some torn pages over the floor. He bends and picks them up one by one. There are mostly accounting pages, from a cheap notebook like the ones the Oxan gate guards use for recording the entries and exits of passengers and goods. He looks at them page by page and throws them down; only keeping the ones with blank spaces that could be used for drawing. He walks to the cabin door, but his foot gets stuck on a plank that seems out of its place. He shines his torch on the protruding plank and takes it out. There is a hole beneath the plank, deep enough to hold a small box or a few books. He takes out the few pages that lie at the bottom of the shallow hole. They are more accounting pages. He gets up and looks at them carefully making sure nothing useful is written on them and throws them down. He searches the cabin with his torch one more time before reaching the door.

Armina’s green scarf has fallen on the floor, beneath the cabin window. He remembers it as she tied and untied it on her head a few times. He takes the scarf in his hands. He was right before. There is something inside the two-layered scarf, something paper like. He tears the scarf edge with his teeth and opens it up. An old, rotting paper appears out of the green fabric layers. He tries not to dust the paper with the pressure of his fingers and takes it out carefully. The paper hidden like this, so close to Armina must possess important information! The handwriting looks familiar. He shines the torch on the yellow old paper. It’s Parsana’s handwriting with the same title ‘Saviour’s Prophecies’! There is a recent writing on the edges of the page that he doesn’t recognise but seems to be Armina’s from the content of it. She has written: ‘I hope Tirad can prove the rightness of this prophecy…’ He sits down on the cabin floor, like the way he had sat in front of Armina last year. He places the torn scarf on his knees and starts reading the rest of the Parsana handwritten pages that Hurmaz had given him before.

Parsana narrates from the Saviour, “As time passes and people settle on the ships, living on the water for a long period, a genetic mutation will begin to make them more compatible to their new ecosystem. This genetic mutation will bring the human species closer to the aquatic species that are similar to humans in size, big fish like dolphins and sharks. The first evolution babies may be deformed or malformed and not survive, causing the death of their mothers giving birth to the unhealthy baby. But as time passes, they will become more complete in their own form, yet they might not survive in human atmospheres or even be killed by them, not wanting to keep the peculiar creatures. This process will go on until the new human species is formed and finds a way to survive outside of the ships and lands. This evolution is inevitable but I cannot say when it will happen, maybe in a hundred years’ time, three hundred or more…”