Since she doesn’t have to escort me to meals anymore, I see less and less of Swift. As one of Santa Elena’s lackeys, she’s part of a rigorous, strange training program that I observe from afar. Each of the five has their own unique focus, which they learn at an advanced level and help pass down to the others. For Chuck, it’s the mechanics of the ship. She spends all day in the engine room, and, from rumors I hear tossed around the deck, she sleeps there most nights rather than in her own bunk. Varma trains with the helmsman, learning the art of maneuvering the ship. It’s occasionally his fault that we lurch against a poorly placed wave, and once I almost chew him out when the Minnow clips Bao under his command. I’m fairly certain it wasn’t an accident. I don’t dare speak up, though; anything that calls attention to myself and what I’m doing makes me a target.

Code has the job that I least understand, maintaining the ship’s navigation systems. The computers are complex, artful things, and he has an uncanny way with them. Lemon’s apprenticed to the lookout, and of the five of them, I’m convinced she’s the smartest. She has a strange intuition for the sea and somehow feels the squalls before we ever see them. Of all the lackeys, she seems like the one most on my side—she always passes an alert down to the trainer deck when we’ve got something bad on the radar, and I’ve been able to get Bao to dive every time.

Swift’s apprenticeship has her maintaining the ship’s guns, Phobos and Diemos. When the captain isn’t on deck, she climbs up on top of the barrels and suns herself like a big cat.

Bao’s training crawls along. With fewer resources and only one trainer, he can’t pick up things as quickly as most of the pups in our stock back home, but he gets by. We usually have a robotic sub to tote around beacons for teaching dive commands, but I take its place, the massive LEDs strapped to my chest and a buoyancy vest locked around me to prevent the extra weight from taking me to the depths. I start to introduce more audio signals to the visual training—things that draw Bao’s attention to the beacon so that no matter how distracted he might be, the lights still call him, still have him under their command.

By mid-October, he’s clearly recovered from the ordeal that left him beached on the trainer deck, and his repertoire has grown to include sustained dives, staying absolutely still, and even basic fetching, which we practice with a life preserver until the day he grows too big to hold it properly in his jaws.