Inside, though, it was like a puzzle that had been jumbled up and reassembled in a different order. I had been on three sunjammers now – four if you counted the commercial clipper – and it was clear that they all did things in their own way. The bone room was usually somewhere near the middle, but that still left a lot of scope for how to get to it, what to have next to it, and so on. The crew’s cabins could be almost anywhere, and so could the galley, navigation room, bridge, captain’s quarters.

There was one commonality, though. The ships all sounded the same. They grumbled and moaned and sang to themselves as if they’d all been raised on the same hymnbook. And they all had the same smell. It was metal and wood and cooking and toilets and too many monkey bodies pressed into the same volume for too long. It had been unfamiliar, at first. But the shivery thing was that I had an entirely different view of that smell now.

It felt like coming home.

Trusko took me to the bone room without making any introductions along the way. ‘I’m expecting a confidential send,’ he said. ‘From a captain and a ship whose names I won’t divulge. That’ll be your first test. If you were thinking of bluffing, now’d be the time to come clean about it.’

‘I wasn’t bluffing.’

He spun the bone room wheel and invited me to float inside. It was a similar set-up to the room on the Monetta, with equipment hung onto the walls and the skull braced in the middle by an arrangement of shock-absorbing wires.

‘Grestad is our usual Reader,’ he said. ‘But Grestad is still down on Mazarile.’ He touched a finger to his forehead, just under the cowlick. ‘I started off reading the bones, back before my grey hardened up. Worked my way up the hard way. So I know the ropes, and I can get a signal out of the bones if no one else is available.’

‘So why’d you need me? Or Grestad?’

‘Grestad’s a better Reader than I was. Besides, I’ve got the ship to run. It’s the usual course of it. If a Reader doesn’t stink the place out, there’s usually a job for them somewhere else, when the bones stop playing nice. You’ve crewed as often as you say, you’d know that.’

‘I did. I just wondered why someone who could still get a signal out of the bones would waste quoins employing someone else.’ I hooked one of the items off the wall. ‘Are these what you call neural bridges? I’ve seen better than this thrown out as junk.’

‘They worked well enough for Grestad. Perhaps your tastes are a little fussy for the Queenie?’