Meanwhile, I listened to the whispers. Over the days I came to recognise some of the senders, picking up a certain signature in the way they pushed their voiceless messages into the superloom. Sometimes I knew which ship or world they were on, but as often as not there was no way of telling where they were or how far it was. But I always formed a clear mental image of them, certain in my head when it was a girl or when it was a boy, and I imagined them a year or two older than me, but rarely very much older than that, and always in their own windowless bone room, sharing their thoughts with the wire-strung bones of a skull that had once known dreams of its own. Some were sharp senders, and they came through like pure notes in an orchestra, and what they were sending was always clear and precise. Others were fuzzier, and you had to strain to get what they were pushing, but that wasn’t always the fault of the sender. Their skulls might be small or old or broken, or the glinty stuff in them might be flickering away to darkness. Or they might be trying to send on a bad channel, using the noise instead of fighting it, so there was less chance of another cove listening in.

The thing that never crossed my mind was that, just as I was getting used to the way the other Bone Readers worked, somewhere out there might be someone getting used to me.

We were three days out from the second bauble when she whispered through.

‘Fura. Tell me it’s you.’

I felt a surge of joy and hope that was like the Old Sun’s light breaking through a knot of worlds.

‘Adrana! It’s me, yes! I said I’d come for you, didn’t I? I know it’s taken a while, but I had to find another ship, and . . . oh, never mind – what’s happened to me doesn’t matter. Are you all right? It can’t be too bad, can it, if she’s letting you use the bones?’

‘She won’t hurt me – not willingly. It’s the only saving grace, the only thing that’s stopped me going mad or doing something desperate. She has to treat me pretty well, and she can’t risk running me to exhaustion or she’ll start getting inaccurate reports. So I’m fed and kept warm and allowed to sleep good hours and she daren’t do anything bad to me in case it shuts down my aptitude. But it hasn’t been good. She knows that we lied, Fura – Garval and I. And that means she knows you might have survived.’

‘Has she punished Garval?’

‘Did you see Father? They were taking you back to Mazarile. Is he all right?’

‘I . . . yes. I saw Father. It’s not good, Adrana. He’s . . .’