“No,” Djordji coughed from the table. “Fortunado is a slave port.”

Isabelle was astonished that Djordji had the presence of mind to heed his surroundings during the surgery, much less respond.

Similce frowned and said, “Around here every neutral port is a black one: they trade in slaves, contraband, vice, and other people’s secrets.”

“Not all,” Djordji whispered. “Marie. Pouch. Little wooden box. Give it to Isabelle.”

Marie detached herself from Isabelle, rummaged through Djordji’s pouch, and handed Isabelle a flat box of polished wood about the size of her palm. It looked like the sort of thing someone with more money than sense would store specialty toothpicks in. She flipped it open and found therein a needle of chartstone, black as onyx and salted with silver grit.

“Where?” Isabelle asked. It wasn’t the Conquest shard; that was made of bone.

“Flotsam,” he said.

Similce’s eyes rounded. “The Gyrine city? And you complain to me about black ports?”

“Not a black port,” Djordji said. “A refuge for Gyrine.”

“Where no one else is allowed,” Similce said. “Where stolen cargos are the only kind? Where kidnapped children go?”

“You makes port,” Djordji wheezed. “Under Tall Clouds protection.”

The surgeon said, “This is not the time for talk.”

Djordji was not likely to give up the argument, so Isabelle said, “Let’s discuss this in the chartroom, see if Flotsam is even close.” The vagabond city was said to move about the sky. It wouldn’t do them any good if it was down at the equator.

Marie appeared at her side, solving the problem of who she should take with her to discourage Similce from trying anything rash.

Marie accompanied them to the chartroom. Similce gave her a wary look. Marie’s expressionless porcelain-doll face and unnerving stillness made people leery. Even men who would scoff at the idea that she might be a top-notch fighter gave her creepiness a wide berth.

Similce opened the orrery’s sympathetic matrix. From somewhere up her sleeve she produced a tightly rolled bundle of chartstone needles and began slotting them into the hyperbaric chambers.

“Where did you hide those?” Isabelle asked.

“Someplace a roll of needles should never go,” Similce said with the edge of a woman trying not to snarl, then she rounded on Isabelle. “Dropping us out of the sky was a cursed foolish thing to do. Could have broke the keel or smashed us to flinders on the aethercoral.”

“It was either that or face the shore guns and the shadowpults,” Isabelle said. “We’d have been sitting ducks. I prefer to go where my enemies aren’t.”

“I figured that about you,” Similce said. “You’re one of them. Don’t mind long odds because you think you’re more clever than the Builder, so you try one maggot-headed stunt after another, and you get away with it, right up until you don’t and you manage to get everyone around you killed.”