Her floor’s still carpeted with dirty clothes. I’ve yet to see her wash them, but I know she must because there’s definitely some sort of rotation going on, and there’s always clean stuff in her drawers. I nudge one of them open and root through it until I find a tank top and a set of shorts that I quickly swap into, dumping my soaking wet clothes in a less-than-convenient heap by the door. I shake out my hair while I’m at it. It falls in my eyes now. Maybe I’ll live long enough to grow it back to shoulder-length.

For a moment, I consider going back to the trainer deck, but all I can see there is Code with the knife, wearing the invincible grin of a boy who’s trapped an animal in a corner. Tonight, that place is haunted. Here is safe.

So I sit on the edge of Swift’s bed and wait until I hear the shuffle of her bootsteps in the corridor outside.

“Cas?” she calls as she sticks her head through the door. She rolls her eyes when she spots me perched on her bunk. “Should’ve known. You are aware that you leave a trail of water pretty much anywhere you go, right?”

“What happened to Code?” I ask, drawing my knees up to my chin as she pushes into the room and closes the hatch behind her. Suddenly my chest feels tight, like I’ve dived too deep and the pressure is crushing my lungs.

Swift pauses, and something bitter flashes in her eyes. “Captain’s having a long chat with him. She threw me out after a point. I dunno what she’s going to do, but I don’t think I wanted to be around to see it anyway.”

I don’t know how to tread here. She’s been on this boat for five years, and so has he. And they’ve been working closely together for at least a year. The night after we took down that bucket, they were celebrating together. Code with a drink in his hand, and Swift with a girl in her lap. But then that afternoon in the Slew a month later, Code had it out for Swift. He wanted to humiliate her, to make her suffer.

And today he wanted to kill her.

I remember how it felt in the Slew, with the crew’s support at my back. That invincible, top-of-the-world feeling—to have that all the time, to have the loyalty of the Minnow. For a moment, I let myself crave it.

For a moment, I understand why Code would do anything to captain this ship.

“I’m sorry,” I tell Swift, figuring it’s the best I can do.