We were in a rented room at Hadramaw Dock, similar to the office where I had first met Rackamore and Cazaray. Trusko was busy with last-minute arrangements before setting sail. I’d done well to get myself before him, but I wasn’t on safe ground just yet. My decision to put on this bold, dismissive front was a dicey one.

‘We don’t cut out for a day, and the launch still has to go up and down at least twice in that time,’ Trusko said, sliding ledgers around on his desk as if he still had half an eye on those matters. ‘Given that, I’ll see what the rest of the crew make of you. It’s true I can use a Bone Reader. But not if she bristles everyone up the wrong way. It’s bad enough with the Scanner we took on at Trevenza—’

‘My experience,’ I said, ‘is that quoins will smooth over a lot of things.’

‘And you think you’d make quoins for us, do you?’

‘What we’re here for, ain’t it?’

‘You do a good job of masking that schooling you’ve had,’ Trusko said, with a thin smile. ‘But it won’t fool the rest of them. Nothing gets you off to a worse start than turning the crew against you, because they think you’re trying to pretend you’re something you’re not.’

‘I know what I am,’ I said.

‘We’ll see.’ He gathered his papers and tapped them into neat order, then held them up before him so that he could run his upper lip across the top of them, making them even neater. ‘You’ll come with me on the launch. Trial by fire. The crew shall have the last say. Best not rile them . . .’ But then he paused. ‘You never did say your name, did you?’

‘Fura,’ I said. ‘Just Fura.’

‘Very well, Just Fura. I make no promises. You look like a barefoot street waif and you’ve got spite in your eyes. You’ve been on the glowy and that never sits well with me, especially if it gets in the grey. But if you’re half the Bone Reader you think you are, maybe you have something to offer.’

‘I’ve plenty to offer,’ I said. ‘Intelligence. Baubles. Fortune. Quoins.’

I spared him the bit about bloody retribution.

Trusko’s launch took us from Hadramaw Dock to the orbit of the Queen Crimson. Like the Monetta’s Mourn, her basic form was a little like a fish, with windows for eyes, sail-control gear for fins and spines, ion radiators for a tail, and a mouth for the forward docking bay. We slipped into the mouth and the jaws clamped us in like a prize.