She plans to leave you and let you fail, her ancestral chorus said, loud and thick with resentment. Marie would abandon her. Betrayal.

No. Isabelle held her tongue, refused to give voice to spite. That was just her past lives talking. She would not pour poison in the well of friendship. She opened her sky chest, pulled out a draught, and choked it down, noting the time in her journal. She was a bit early, but it had been a taxing day.

“That doesn’t mean I have to stay with them,” Marie said. “Djordji reckons he’s been away from his clan for fifty years now, but they’re still his clan.”

Isabelle wiped the slime from her mouth with a kerchief. She wanted to beg Marie for assurances that she would come back, but that would be too needy. “So why did he leave?” she asked by way of changing the subject.

“That’s not my story to tell,” Marie said.

“So, why become a fellhand?”

Marie in her affectless voice said, “Fighting … helps me. My emotions build up until they hurt. I can’t cry. I can’t smile. Even when I shout, my voice just gets louder, not more forceful. The things I feel I can’t get out. Fighting lets me feel, lets me purge, lets me get empty enough to feel peace. More than that, I’m good at it. Djordji says, ‘If you want to find your path, you finds the thing you’d rather fail than quit.’”

“Ah,” Isabelle said. “That I understand.” She was that way with mathematics. The unresolved proof was the one that called to her the most. The difference was, an unsolved equation was unlikely to get her killed.

After dinner, Jean-Claude found Rebecca in the capitaine’s galley packing away her food like a demented squirrel on the edge of winter.

“Remind me to add table manners to your list of lessons,” Jean-Claude said.

Rebecca tossed him a rude gesture and continued stuffing her face. “Nvr bn sss hngry n m lfff.”

“Or at least since this morning,” Jean-Claude said. “The capitaine told me about your sticky fingers today.”

Outrage bloomed on Rebecca’s face, “She’d no call to do that. I said I was sorry, didn’t I? And I cleaned out the crap chute good and proper.”

“Marie told me that with sufficient prodding you did a passable job.”

When Rebecca looked like she was going to explode again, Jean-Claude said, “At this point no one is upset at you. You have a clean slate, as the aeronauts say. Do you want to keep it that way?”

Rebecca gave him a wary look. “Mebbe.”