I found the cloth Cazaray had used to moisten her brow, and went to the water dispenser in the wall. I returned to Garval, stationing myself at her side, and tried to open her fingers enough to slip my hand into hers.

‘You asked if we were the new ones. I’m Fura, and my sister’s Adrana. You were right about us: we’ve come aboard to do the same thing you did – to read the skull. I know it didn’t work out well for you, but that’s not your fault. You had to find a way off your world, and you did. Adrana and I were the same.’

I dabbed the wettened cloth against her brow and lips, while she twitched and jerked as violently as when I had entered the room.

‘Well, maybe not the same,’ I went on. ‘We didn’t have it that bad. It’s just that things hadn’t gone very well for the family. Mainly, I think Adrana wanted adventure – earning quoins was just an excuse, a way to justify what she did. She tricked me, in a way, but by the time I realised what she’d done, I think I liked the idea of escaping just as much as she did.’

Whether it was my words, my presence, or just a change in the weather in her head, but Garval’s distress seemed to lessen by some small degree. I administered the cloth again. I had no fear of waking the others with my talking: if they could sleep through Garval, they could sleep through the Sundering.

‘Velgen,’ she said, just that one word.

‘Someone close to you?’ I asked, chancing that it was the name of a person rather than a world.

‘Brother,’ she answered, her voice roughened from all the moaning. ‘Good brother. Good Velgen. I should have looked after him better. You look after each other, don’t you?’

‘We do,’ I answered. But it was the sort of thing you say, whether you mean it or not.

‘Where are we?’

‘At the bauble now, orbiting it. It’s going to open soon and they’re going inside it. I don’t think it’s a dangerous place, really. They have charts and the crew seem to know what they’re doing. Rackamore seems confident . . .’

She cut across my words with a thin, knowing smile on her lips. ‘Don’t always believe what your captain says.’

‘I think he wants the best for us.’

‘The best for himself. If the rest of ’em do all right out of it, that’s a bonus.’

I looked to the door, making certain it was shut. It was just a conversation, but all of a sudden it had a mutinous edge that made my skin prickle.

‘I don’t think he’s a bad man.’