I understood why he had his doubts. I’d have had my doubts as well. But the shivery part was that I hadn’t needed to fake a word of it. It was all real, even though I’d never heard of Resparis, his stricken ship, or the Daughters of Blood and Milk. I was getting better at reading the bones, just like Cazarary said I would.

Scarily better.

The crew had gathered in the galley. It was aft of the bone room, smaller than the one on the Monetta, but it served the same function. There were six of them in the room when we arrived, and five of those faces were totally new to me. I endeavoured to treat the sixth no differently.

‘Take a seat,’ Trusko said, indicating the long double-sided bench that spanned most of the galley. ‘But don’t get too comfortable. I think you’ll be back on that launch soon enough.’

‘I didn’t know we needed a new cleaning girl,’ said a snide-looking man.

‘That tin hand of hers looks pretty,’ said the woman next to him. She had a famished, sucked-in look about her, as if there were a vacuum under her skin. ‘Pity about what it’s stuck to.’

‘She’s got the glowy about her,’ said another man, sucking on an ornate clay pipe carved into the form of a sunjammer. ‘I don’t likes the glowy.’

‘I had the glowy in me once,’ said an older woman, with a lopsided look to her face, one eye staring out wider and crazier than the other.

‘And look how you worked out,’ said the snide one.

‘What’s your name, cove?’ asked Prozor, who was squeezed in next to the pipe man. ‘Got a tongue in your gob, ain’t you?’

‘Fura,’ I answered delicately, looking Prozor right in the eyes. ‘And you’d be?’

‘Never you mind me.’ I gave her as long as I dared, measuring the ways she’d changed and not changed. It hadn’t been long, I told myself. But Prozor looked harder and meaner than she had before, and that was like saying a rock looked rockier. ‘What’s the story with this one, Cap’n? I didn’t think we were signin’ anyone on.’

‘We may not be, Prozor,’ Trusko answered her. ‘That’ll depend on a number of factors. Fura wants to crew with us – thinks she might be able to get something more out of the bones than Grestad.’

The snide man scoffed out a laugh. ‘That’s not much of a benchmark.’

‘We won’t speak ill of Grestad when she’s not in our presence,’ Trusko said, but I could tell he had lost that argument before it was begun. ‘Fura can read the bones. That’s not in doubt. But as to how deep her abilities go, I’m just waiting on a squawk that might . . .’