In one hand he held a multi-bar quoin, tapping it against the desk.

‘See for yourselves,’ he said, moving aside some of the remaining papers to expose a handwritten sheet. ‘This is a breakdown of my losses over the last ten years – the crew who died, were injured, who never came back; set against capital earnings. Cazaray will vouch for it.’

The younger man sitting next to him nodded at the ledger.

‘I’ve lost two Scanners, three Openers, one Assessor, one Integrator,’ Rackamore went on. ‘That’s a normal rate of attrition for the kinds of target we go after. We’ve hauled in to seventeen baubles in that time, and cracked thirteen of them. I lost the Integrator when a piece of Fifth Occupation technology turned on her.’

I swallowed.

‘That’s rare, though,’ he went on. ‘Integrators normally stay on-ship when my teams are working a bauble, and on-ship is always the safest place to be. There’s no reason for a Sympathetic – a Bone Reader – to leave the ship.’ Rackamore drew a clean, manicured nail down one of the columns on the ledger. ‘See for yourselves. I’ve never lost a Bone Reader.’

‘Then why do you need a new one?’ Adrana asked.

Rackamore looked surprised. ‘Didn’t Mr Quindar outline our situation while he was bringing you to the docks?’

‘Getting anything straight out of that grinning spider was more of a challenge than it was worth,’ Adrana said.

‘Mm.’ Rackamore set his features in a troubled grimace. ‘Tell them, Cazaray.’

The younger man was dressed as well as Rackamore, and his voice, although higher, was also that of an educated man. His face was scrubbed and pink, his hair blond, raffishly tousled. ‘Even the best of us don’t last for ever in the position, Miss . . .?’

‘Adrana,’ she answered levelly, meeting his gaze.

‘And I’m Arafura,’ I put in.

Cazaray nodded and looked at us in turn, a touch bashfully, before settling his attention on Adrana. ‘We start young – the sooner the better, generally speaking. As our brain circuits harden into place, it becomes knottier to maintain coherence with the skull, or to adjust to changes within the skull itself. And almost impossible to learn to work with a completely new skull.’ He leaned back in his seat. ‘There’s no tragedy in it. I’ve had a good run, and I don’t mind saying that I’ve been well rewarded for it.’

‘What are you going to do next? I asked.

‘Train up my successor first – no small business. After that, I should be very content to retire. I’ve earned enough.’ I noticed now that there was a distance in his eyes, the same one people said they saw in ours. ‘Under someone like Captain Rackamore, on a good ship like the Monetta’s Mourn, ten years is enough to set you up. Provided you don’t have exorbitant tastes.’