Adrana and I looked at each other. Neither of us had imagined it. It was muffled, but it couldn’t be coming from far away. Despite ourselves, we began to work towards the source of the noise. There were doors all along the corridor, marked for stores, equipment and so on, but we’d given them no thought until now. The final door, before the corridor bent around, had a grille cut into it, and a kind of sliding partition, large enough to shove a hand through.

The sound was coming from behind this door.

It was a woman’s whimpering, interspersed with chokes and gurgles and odd little fragments of half-language.

I tried the door. It was on hinges, like an ordinary door, and after I’d clicked the latch it pushed open easily enough.

I peered through the gap while Adrana hovered next to me.

‘What is it?’ my sister asked.

‘There’s someone in there. On a bed. Not a hammock, a proper bed.’

I saw a figure, lying on their back. She was fully clothed, on top of bedsheets. Straps bound her to the bed, criss-crossed over her chest, with more securing her arms and legs, and another strap doing the same for her head.

Despite these restraints, the figure was doing her best to struggle free.

Adrana pushed me aside, taking in her view of the bound sleeper. ‘What are they doing with her?’ she asked, as if I had all the answers.

I grimaced my irritation back at my sister. ‘Maybe we should ask her.’

I went through the doorway and into the room, more fearlessly than I felt. The woman couldn’t move much but she twisted her head as far as she was able and tracked me with her eyes, so wide open they were mostly white. A tongue moved across her lips. She was struggling a bit less, as if sudden curiosity had taken her mind off whatever was troubling her.

‘You’re new to them,’ she said, rasping out the words the way someone sounds when they’ve been punched in the throat. ‘New voices. I heard you scuttling around. Sisters, aren’t you?’

‘We might be,’ I said guardedly.

‘Brought you in to snoop on the bones, did they?’

‘And if they did?’ Adrana asked.

‘You want some advice, you get off this ship as soon as you can. And don’t let the bones get into you. You don’t want their whispering inside your dreams. You think you’re strong enough to keep the whispers where they belong? I thought I was strong, too.’

‘Ah,’ said a voice, startling us from the door. ‘You’ve saved me the trouble.’

‘The trouble of what?’ I asked, trying not to look all guilty and furtive.