There wasn’t anything. The old bones were silent. After an interval, we agreed to try some of the surrounding nodes, just in case the focus had wandered. But they were as dead as the first.

A long silence passed, before I dared pipe up.

‘Something’s not right.’

‘I know.’

‘We should try separate inputs, just in case there’s a problem with using the same node. Maybe there’s more to it than Cazaray told us.’

‘Perhaps . . .’ Adrana said doubtfully.

But it was worth trying anyway. We went back to the old method, connecting at adjacent sites.

‘It’s still dead,’ Adrana said, after a while.

‘Yes.’

‘I mean really dead.’ She was bending over to look into the skull through the eyeholes. I watched her expression cloud. ‘Something’s wrong, Fura. Those little lights . . . the twinkly alien stuff . . . you can hardly see any of it. We can’t have broken it, can we?’

‘Cazaray warned us against it, he didn’t forbid us. He said we weren’t quite ready – not that we could never do it.’ I took both neural bridges and placed them back on the wall. ‘If it’s our fault, it’s only because we were trying to help the ship. No one’ll hold that against us.’

We left the bone room, tightening the wheel on the other side of the door as Cazaray had instructed. When we got back to the galley Triglav and Prozor were using tankards as game pieces, shifting them around the magnetic hexagons of the table. It looked like the kind of game children play for a season before the novelty wears off. Hirtshal was coming in from the bridge where the sweeper was cycling around. He still had his fingers webbed in the knotty puzzle.

‘We’d like to speak to Cazaray,’ Adrana said. ‘Get him on the squawk.’

Triglav abandoned the game, leaned over to the galley’s squawk console, worked the heavy switches and dials. Static crackled out of the speaker grille. ‘Captain Rackamore? Triglav here. Yes, all’s well. It’s just that your shiny new Bone Readers would like a chinwag with Master Cazaray, if that isn’t too much trouble.’

Cazaray sounded agreeable enough. ‘Hello. Is there something I need to know?’

Triglav invited me to speak into the console.

‘This is Arafura, Cazaray. I’m here with Adrana. We’ve just come back from the bone room.’

‘And – is there something I ought to know?’

‘We’re not sure. There wasn’t anything wrong with the skull the last time, but now it seems to be . . . dead.’

‘Dead,’ Cazaray repeated. ‘And by dead you mean . . .’

‘We thought there might be something wrong with the connections,’ Adrana said. ‘I’m going to be honest: we tried connecting in on the same node. We wanted to see if we could amplify a faint signal . . .’