‘If she touches Drozna,’ Strambli said, finding some ferocity in herself that I’d never seen before, ‘I’ll pop her eyeballs out myself, stick ’em on skewers, and jam ’em back in her sockets the wrong way round.’

‘We can’t leave it any longer,’ I said. ‘It’s Bosa we wanted, not her goons. Does everyone still have their blades and bows?’

We did a quick inventory. I’d regained my weapons after being rescued by Tindouf, and I still had the Ghostie pistol. The others still had their crossbows, and we made sure they were all drawn, bolted and ready to go. Here we were then: only a drift away from the room where she was. Part of me was straining to be in there, putting right what she’d wronged. But another part of me would have given anything not to face Bosa Sennen.

‘We’re not ready,’ I said, hoping I was sharing a common thought with the others. ‘But we’ll never be readier. And no one’s come close to doing what we’ve already done.’

‘Let’s take her,’ Strambli said.

And we nodded one after the other. There wasn’t any telling when it had happened, or what part in it Trusko could say was his. But somewhere between the Fang and this gathering, we’d become something we never were before, and that uncommon alchemy was as close to magical as anything that ever happened in all the long histories of the Thirteen Occupations.

We’d turned into a crew.

Drozna was dead. He’d been shot through the throat with a crossbow bolt, the same way Bosa killed Triglav, and if I might have doubted the presence of her hand until then, that would have been all the evidence I needed.

Trusko, though, was still alive. He wasn’t even wounded. He’d been punched around a bit, that was plain, but other than a cut lip and a bruised eye, which only made him look softer and puffier, he wasn’t much different than when we’d left him. Bosa had him strapped into a seat, and one of her black-suited boarders was on either side of him, but Bosa herself wasn’t in the galley. We’d already checked Trusko’s private quarters, so that only left the bridge, connecting off the galley the same way it had done on the Monetta. And now that we listened, we could hear her voice. She was using the squawk.

Or trying to.