I wanted to believe he’d made a mistake; that both of those men were still breathing, but deep down I knew Rackamore wasn’t in error. And I thought of both of them, the way they’d been good-hearted to Adrana and I, and of Cazaray in particular, who I’d come to regard a decent man who wanted the best for everyone around him, and now they were gone and the speed at which it had happened was almost too shocking to take in. I don’t suppose I’d really known grief until then, because when mother died we were both small, and there are some emotions you can’t really feel until you’re older. But it wasn’t just grief. I was angry, too, and a little part of that anger was turned back at myself for not voicing my fears early enough.

‘Did they suffer?’ I asked.

‘No,’ Rackamore said. ‘The one mercy was that it was quick.’ But his jaw tensed and he needed to gather himself before continuing. ‘I’m afraid we also lost Hirtshal and Trysil out there, and they didn’t have that mercy. You saw all that, I think. Triglav: I’m sorry. We did what we could.’

‘You did more than you had to,’ Triglav replied.

‘You think it’s her?’

‘If it’s not the Nightjammer, Cap’n, it’s her vicious bitch of a twin. She’s close enough for the eyes now. Take a look for yourself.’

Triglav meant one of the screens, which was showing a view through one of the cameras outside the ship. To begin with it was hard to know what I was looking at, as if someone had made a collage out of different kinds of black fabric, so nearly similar that you couldn’t say where one piece ended and another began. But slowly my eyes got the shape of it.

‘It’s like us,’ I said.