‘Space sickness,’ Jusquerel said. ‘If this is your first time up, it’s no wonder. We don’t run with a doctor on this ship, so if anyone fits that bill, I suppose it’s me.’ She fished into a pocket and came out with a little metal tin. She clacked it onto the magnetic table, slid it over to us like a deck of cards. ‘One a day should see you straight, but take two if you need to. My guess is you’ll be fine by the time we hit the bauble.’

I took the tin. It was pretty, with a machine-engraved pattern of interlocking birds, and I wondered if it had come from one of the earlier Occupations.

It was often difficult to tell if things were a hundred years old, or a hundred thousand.

‘Do we owe you anything?’ Adrana asked.

‘Do well by the bones,’ Jusquerel said, ‘and that’ll be payment enough for me.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘How long will it be, until we get to the bauble?’

‘I can’t tell you,’ she answered, drawling out her answer as if some mainspring or regulator in her head ran a little off synchronisation with the rest of us.

‘Can’t or won’t?’ I asked.

‘Can’t. None of us know, except Cap’n Rack and maybe Cazaray. That’s how it works. If one of us knew which bauble we were headed to and squawked that information to another crew . . . or even just blabbed about it without thinking – that could ruin us. So the Cap’n tells us to expect a voyage of at least a certain number of weeks or months, and we make sure we’ve provisions for that sort of trip. Hirtshal sets the sails, but even Hirtshal doesn’t know how far out or for how long we’re going – not until the Cap’n gives another order, and we steer or haul in.’

‘You said Cazaray,’ I replied.

‘Yes.’

‘Why would he know?’

‘The only way secrets come in and off this ship – other than sealed papers in the Cap’n’s pocket – is through the Bone Reader. There’s no way for the Bone Reader not to know anything important about a sunjammer – and if you try to hide it from them, they’ll find out anyway.’

‘So Bone Reader’s quite an important position,’ Adrana said. ‘But they also have to be someone quite young, or they can’t work with the bones.’

‘Yes,’ Jusquerel. ‘Young. Often the youngest of any of us. But gifted with the Cap’n’s secrets and the Cap’n’s ear.’ She gave a barely interested shrug. ‘You can see how that might sit badly with some people.’

‘I suppose it might,’ Adrana said.

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