The next morning, I wake up to the girl who saved my life shoving me out of her bed. “Captain said you’re hatching the beast today, since you’re all rested up,” Swift grumbles, stepping over me as she staggers to her feet.

I prop myself up on my elbows, watching as she rummages through the drawers. I’ve got no earthly idea what time it is, apart from “not night.” There’s no window in Swift’s bunk, and it strikes me now that the janitorial closet might have been roomier.

When she strips off her shirt, I don’t spare her the way she spared me. Her body is laced with scars, but that’s not the only thing marking her skin. Inked across the bottom of her rib cage is a bird, its pointed wings curving down toward her hips, its head covered by the bottom edge of her bra. A swift.

Of course.

“So did your mom give you that name, or did people just see your tattoo and start calling you that?” I ask.

“Mom.” She says the word like it’s eggshells that she’s dancing over. “Now quit staring, jackass,” she snaps, and throws her shirt in my face. “Get off the floor. You’ve got shit to do.”

Five minutes later, we’re jogging through the halls on the ship’s lowest level. Down here, the engines groan and grumble as if we’re passing through a giant metal heart, and the smell of saltwater winds through the air. The upper part of the Minnow is stitched together from mismatched pieces, the halls bleeding from metal to wood and plastic in a train wreck of bolts and glue. But down here, the comforts of the yacht parts melt away into the cold, industrial womb of a warship.

We round a corner and step through a hatch into what I should have known the ship possessed from the start. The Minnow already has a built-in trainer deck. There are two huge cutaways with roll-up doors on either side of the hull that open out to the ocean, and a runoff trough that takes in whatever seawater washes over and sweeps it into a channel that feeds out the back of the ship. A massive cutaway dominates the rear wall, with a similar set of roll-up doors which have been pulled up to give us a wide, sweeping view of the morning sea. The floor is damp under my bare feet, and I take care not to slip as I pick my way after Swift. Santa Elena waits at the edge of the trough, four of her crew beside her and the pup’s tank at her side.