Prozor might have had that tin plate under her scalp, but she’d still taken a good beating. I knew she was weak, but there was no water to offer, and when I told her I could cut her some lightvine she just laughed. ‘You got to cook it, girlie. You don’t just eat it raw, not if you don’t want the glowy getting into you. You ain’t been eating’ it raw, have you?’

‘No . . . no,’ I stammered. ‘That would be silly, wouldn’t it? What’s the glowy?’

Prozor might have picked up on my hesitation, but she wasn’t pulling on all sails and her focus kept slipping away. It was like trying to have a conversation with a very old person, someone whose memory doesn’t stretch back more than a few minutes.

‘Water in the ion coolers,’ she said, during one of the interludes when she was sharper. ‘Separate system from the drinking water, and maybe not as pure, but it’ll keep us alive for now.’ And she gave me instructions on how to siphon water out of the cooling system, situated in what had been Triglav’s ion control room. There wasn’t enough heat to cook the lightvine, but Prozor said it was getting water in us that mattered more than food, and if we looked famished when Jastrabarsk rescued us they’d treat us nicer.

I had a lot of questions for her. It was finding the right moment to ask them that was the tricky part.

‘I told Jastrabarsk it was Bosa that had taken us, and he asked me if I was certain it was her. Why would he doubt?’

‘Bosa Sennen’s a name,’ Prozor said. ‘One that’s been spoken of for too long for it to be just one person.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘No one lives longer than a hundred years – not in this Occupation anyway. Nothing that anyone’s ever found in a bauble’s changed that, although that ain’t stopped ’em looking. But crews were being picked off by Bosa Sennen long before I was born, and her name already went back a generation or two then. It ain’t possible.’

‘But you saw her. You know she’s real.’

‘I know there’s someone calling themselves Bosa Sennen, and using the power of that name to put the shivers into people. But that don’t mean it’s the same Bosa Sennen that was taking ships fifty years ago, or a hundred.’

‘But Rack knew her. It was Bosa that took his daughter, wasn’t it? And the same Bosa that came back this time.’