The next days pass in a haze. The trainer deck hatch is kept locked tight, and my twenty-four-hour supervision begins. I sleep in bursts, woken by the pup whenever he gets hungry and starts to squall. As my scalp starts to heal, I cut the rest of my hair short to even out the damage. My ribs ache constantly.

Every morning the ship’s cook, a giant Islander woman named Hina, comes down with a new barrel of fish caught by the Minnow’s trawler. The entire trainer deck starts to reek of what goes into Bao and what comes out. I have to flush out his filthy tank water every day.

It’s hell. There’s no lighter way of putting it. I realize after the first week that I wouldn’t have a chance if someone decided to come and kill me. I’m too exhausted to put up a fight.

And if Swift was on my side after watching me birth the pup, that ship has sailed. She brings me food and escorts me to the head on my breaks, but I can tell that her patience with this game is running thin. If her life didn’t depend on it, she’d probably be first in line at my throat.

Once a night, I let myself grieve Durga. I let myself imagine that I trusted my instincts, that I never let the Nereid depart with a dying Reckoner as its escort, that I’d figured out what was wrong with her. I don’t know what caused her body to fall apart like that, but it’s clear as day that the pirates were behind it. Someday I’ll figure out exactly what they did to her.

Until then, I curl up on my counter with my head in my hands and cry until there’s nothing left.

One night, I wake up to the hatch swinging open, and for a second I’m certain that a bullet is about to find my brain. In the darkness, I can’t make out the figure that steps through the door.

Bao sleeps on. The little bastard is actually snoring.

Only three people on this ship have the key to get into the trainer deck. One of them just drops off fish, one doesn’t want anything to do with me, but the third …

“Captain?” I ask.

“Just checking in on things,” Santa Elena replies.

I want to ask her why that’s necessary in the middle of the night, but if I’ve learned anything on this ship, it’s that Santa Elena is beyond questioning.

She hits the dim lights, filling the deck with a warm glow as she approaches the pup’s tank. The captain is dressed in a red bathrobe, which she hugs tighter around herself as she peers over the edge at the slumbering baby Reckoner. “It’s always hardest at the start,” she says.