I’ll say this for us: we exercised restraint. It wasn’t that we were feeling charitable, or in any sort of forgiving mood. None of that, not after all she’d dished out to us. But the Queenie was gone and we still needed a ship if we were ever to get home, wherever that might turn out to be. The Nightjammer wasn’t top of the list of ships I might have chosen, but it was all we had.

So we took her, without too much damage, and it was glorious, and at the end of it all there wasn’t one of us that wasn’t proud to have sailed on the Queenie, under Captain Trusko.

‘She’s ours now,’ I said. ‘This ship. Whatever wrongs she’s done, they were never the ship’s fault. And we can start putting her right.’

‘There’s one wrong I ought to settle first of all,’ Prozor said. ‘For you as well, Fura. We didn’t do right by Garval, when she was one of us. But we can treat her properly now. I know it’s too late for her, but I ain’t spending a minute more on this ship with her stuck on the front like that.’

‘I’d help you,’ I said, sorry that I hadn’t given more thought to Garval myself. ‘You know that, don’t you? But I’ve got to find my sister.’

Find Adrana, and tell her the hardest news of all.

She was in the Nightjammer’s bone room when we took the ship, and she’d had the good sense to stay there while the bloodletting was in progress. None of us knew where the room was, of course, but – as I’d learned by then – it was in the general rule of things to find the bone room about as far from the noisy parts of the ship as you could manage, and as far enough inside as possible. Looking somewhere near the middle was always a good bet, and if you worked methodically out from the centre it wouldn’t be long before you found your bones, no matter how cleverly your crew had tried to conceal their most precious asset.

Bosa did her best, I’ll give her credit for that. The door and locking wheel were hidden behind a false partition that sprang back into place after you’d gone through. But I’d have ripped that ship apart with my fingernails if I’d needed to.

I knocked on the door, using the pattern we’d agreed, and I was turning the wheel with my own hands when I felt Adrana put her own muscles into the effort. The wheel spun until it was a blur, and then the door swung open, and we were together again.