Bitterlich resisted the urge to try to buck up her spirits. “Yes. It’s really hard. It feels like you’ve tripped in the dark and you’re falling and you don’t know where the ground is.”

Rebecca bobbed her head morosely. “Something like that.”

Bitterlich exercised patience. She didn’t need judgment or advice or wisdom, just simple understanding and acceptance.

At length she sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “What happens now?”

“You breathe,” he said. “And your heart beats, and you pick yourself up, and you keep going. That’s really all there is to it.”

“But where am I going to?” she asked, a trace of the panic echoing in the back of her voice. It was the future that had come unstuck in her mind.

“Nobody really knows,” Bitterlich said. “When I was your age I thought I was going to inherit my father’s lands and become Herr Bitterlich. That didn’t happen. Neither did anything else ever turn out like I expected. Last year I was serving as a spy for Comtesse Impervia. I never dreamed I’d be a marine major on a ship hunting for treasure on a craton nobody even knew existed. Three months ago it probably never occurred to you you’d be Capitaine Isabelle’s cabin girl. Yesterday, you didn’t know you were a Seelenjäger. Tomorrow will bring its own surprises.”

Rebecca fell silent again, working all that out. He remembered Monsieur Belleaux saying, “A young person’s mind is like a wine cask. Clearly something is going on in there even if nobody understands it.”

“So,” she said, “why did all my buttons pop off, and my belt buckle?”

“Ah,” Bitterlich said. He imagined she’d circled back to the otherwise trivial question that had started her emotional avalanche. “They’re made of metal. You can bring a small amount of extra material into your Seelengewölbe, but it has to be something that was once alive, like wool, linen, or leather.”

“Your buttons go with you,” Rebecca said.

“Mine are made of bone,” Bitterlich said. “It’s a problem all Seelenjägers deal with.”

“Oh,” Rebecca said, holding her buttons. “So sewing these back on isn’t going to work.”

“Not even a little.” He stood. “Come. I’ll give you some of my spares.”

CHAPTER

Fourteen

Jean-Claude wobbled back into consciousness, a condition complicated by the looking-at-the-world-through-a-greasy-windowpane feeling of a poppy-milk hangover. Pain waited for him like a ring of torch-and-pitchfork-wielding peasants, and his limbs seemed to have gone off on pilgrimage for all that he could feel them.

His vision was blurry in his left eye, and every inch of him was crosshatched with scratches and punctuated with punctures.

He lay under an open porthole that let in the coppery tang of the deep sky. At least he still had both eyes, and there were no damned gulls trying to peck them out.