Drozna was the only one waiting for us on the other side of the lock. The cove had no warning what to expect, so it was instructive to see the play of reactions across his face, like a speeded-up version of what we’d already been through at our leisure, between the bauble and the Queenie. First there was the confusion and bewilderment brought on by the first sight of the Ghostie armour – the eyes and the optic nerves and the brain all befuddled by encountering something that got harder to see the more you looked at it, until – when you were peering right at it – it not only wasn’t there, but neither was the notion of it. Then there was the secondary reaction, a kind of squinting, headachey puzzlement, brought on by the notion that our bodies had been shattered into something abstract, so that while Drozna could keep tabs on our hands and feet and the gaps between the pieces of armour, assembling that jigsaw into three people, moving independently of each other, was twenty times knottier than it ought to have been. Then there was the third stage of it, and that was closer to revulsion or sickness than confusion, and it showed in a slackening of his jaw, a curl to his lips, a widening of his eyes, all signalling the realisation that what he was seeing wasn’t only wrong, it was wrong in ways that churned the stomach and left a person feeling shivery and tainted, as if just seeing the Ghostie armour left a hard blemish on the soul.

‘It’s all right, cove,’ I said to Drozna, before he coughed up his insides. ‘It’s us. We’re on your side. But Trusko’s knotting things up for us nicely.’

‘I think you should listen to them,’ Strambli said. ‘They’ve tricked us, the two of them. But it’s them that’s going to dig us out of the same mess.’

‘Or it was,’ Prozor said, and I didn’t like the tone of that at all.

We pushed through the Queenie until we reached the galley, and then the bridge, where Trusko was floating next to the squawk console, resting one hand on the ceiling over it to steady himself. He was flipping switches with the other hand, saying a few words over and over again.

‘Trusko to Bosa Sennen. Respond immediately. I have vital information. Do not attempt to board us. You are walking into a trap. They have Ghostie armour.’ Then he’d flip a switch, say it again. ‘Trusko to Bosa Sennen . . .’

Prozor came up behind him. Or at least I kept forcing myself to hold onto the idea of it being Prozor, even as the effort of it made my head spin.

‘Stop, Captain,’ she said, holding the edge of a Ghostie blade not far off his throat, bare above the ring of his helmet collar.

He flipped one more switch. ‘Trusko to Bosa Sennen!’