There’s no sign of where we are in all this murk and shadow. I could take a chance, ask the wardens, but I prefer to keep my face in its current configuration. I swing my step but keep the rhythm, swaying left when the chain sways right, and craning for a sign of the boat we’ve landed on. A name would be good, but I could use a number just as well, maybe trade it up and down the line until someone recognised it. Anything’s better than what I’ve got, and what I’ve got is close to nothing. A general sense of size. The length of corridors, and the height of hatches.

From what I can see and hear, we’re somewhere under the maindecks, aboard a tub that’s got reason to have more than one kind of deck. An assault carrier, or maybe a big destroyer. A shellboat, maybe, but I don’t think I’ve gotten quite so lucky. The walls don’t have company markings yet, but wherever we are, NorCol wants us in line and out of trouble.

They’ve certainly put the effort in. It takes two to beat a chain gang: one to hold the nose and the other to whip the tail. The wardens know that just like we do, but they’ve surrounded us with company boots, and made our escorts into a statement of intent. They’re here to watch us walk and kick our shins when we start edging off the narrow.

They’ve been with us twenty, thirty minutes now, if I had to guess. We’ve come most of a K from the hangar where we arrived. The going is slow, but we could’ve stretched that distance if it was what we meant to do. We didn’t, and we don’t. Wherever we’re going, there’s something like death waiting near the end. And even if there wasn’t, there’s an art to moving in chain, and slow is the only way to do it that doesn’t cost you skin.

There are two heavy rings round my ankles, joined in the middle. The chain runs up from there and around my throat, where it’s cinched with a padlock. The lock rubs against my chest, an anchor that’s been left in the water a little too long, gone to feathering rust and sea-green scale so thick you’d have to crack your way in just to reach the keyhole. Not that it would do you any good without the Christs-damn key. I’ve never seen it; not on the day they put me in chain, standing on the block in Kiruna’s lime-and-concrete quad, and not any time since. I’m starting to think it doesn’t exist.