One by one, as life on the ship settled into the routine of watches, grub and squint-time, I ended up having conversations with most of them. It was me cooking the grub, as I’d cooked on the Monetta, and that helped grease our exchanges even more. As I doled out servings I also doled out little clues to my past, more with some than others, enough that if they all got together and shared notes they might have come up with something halfway to the truth. It wasn’t about linking myself to Bosa Sennen, though, but giving them a reason to stop digging. Something rough had happened, and it had made me spiky, and there didn’t need to be more to it than that.

The glowy was a problem, though, and so was the arm. Sailors understood that the glowy got into people, and that wasn’t what put the doubt into them. It was the way I didn’t seem to mind, the way I gave off every impression of being a bit proud of it, like it was a tattoo that had been put on me after I did something brave. But too many people had warned me that the glowy got into your brain if you let it, and once it was there you didn’t see things clearly any more. I thought of the hard things I’d had to do to get back on a ship, and wondered if I’d done them only because I needed to, or because the glowy had made it easier to start being cruel and hard, even to myself. Thinking back to the sick girl in her bed, and then measuring her against the cove I was turning into, I knew that I’d sailed over something that couldn’t ever be uncrossed. Some big, shivery void.

That version of Fura, all sick and sorry for herself, being made sicker by Morcenx’s drugs, her father trying to burn away the memory of her older sister like she was some kind of stain, that Fura was someone I had known once and then discarded, like a friend who didn’t measure up.

This Fura was different. This Fura was harder and scowlier and knew what needed to be done. This one could turn her back on her own dying father, or watch a blinded man whimper in pain and not give one cold cuss. This one could cut her own hand off if it helped. This one didn’t care what people thought of Fura.

And even as I cursed those tin fingers, which wouldn’t yet do a tenth of what I wanted from them, I knew which Fura I liked the best.

17

17

There was a scratch, a tug on my curtain. Then a sharp-angled face, upside down, gloomy in the lightvine.

‘Time we had a chinwag.’

The ship grumbled around us. Someone snored a bunk or two away.