“Apparitor!” Baru dashed through the clipper’s middeck, through the low-hanging beams and steel hooks. Helbride’s guts boomed with energy. The roar of voices and the smash of hammers, the shriek of scalpels on glass, the groan of timber and rope as Helbride ran on the wind; among the sickbeds the stink of blood and alcohol and hot amputation saws. Cooks boned their fish over blood gutters.

Helbride was as loud and wet as a living thing.

She broke through streams of sailors calling out in Apacaho creole, skittered around carpenter’s tools, vaulted a barrel only to trip on loose ropes and batter her elbows against stored timbers as she fell. When she stood she slammed her head into the tarnished arm of a spare anchor. Grunting and swearing she staggered into the stern, where a few slender slot cabins served the ship’s passengers, surgeons’ work, and Apparitor himself.

“Svir!” she shouted, because using his name in front of the crew would irritate him. “Svir, wake up!”

He had disassembled the captain’s cabin and the wardroom to make more space for survey instruments and maps. Now he slept in a cubby of varnished pine with his hammock, his books, a lacquered wooden map nailed to the outer wall. Bottles of The Grand Purifier vodka and golden Aurdwynni whiskeys glimmered warm under a whale-oil lantern. But that warmth did not reach Apparitor, who stood like a ribbon of pale shark cartilage, unshirted, with his hair down his back and his knuckles in his teeth.

Baru stared in astonishment at his naked back. He had terrible, branching jellyfish-sting scars, pink and pale, all over him. They were absolutely not the wounds of a lash. He looked as if he’d put a jellyfish on as a cap, and let it sting the whole height of him.…

“Of course I’m awake. What is it?” He’d been going over his service ledger, scratching out the names of the dead. He’d chewed his bare knuckles down to blood.

“Sulane’s on the northern horizon,” Baru panted. “She gained half a mile on us overnight.”

Apparitor swore and threw his pen at Baru. She caught it in her right hand, without thinking, and they both stared at her fist in surprise for a moment. Then Apparitor threw a rag novel at her, too, which struck her in the breast and made her grunt, dropping the pen.

“Why!” Apparitor shouted. “Why the fuck didn’t we go east? Isla Cauteria! Loyal ships! The trade lanes to Falcrest! Instead of fucking south! You know what’s south? Pirate waters and maelstrom and fuck all to help us!”

“Because Yawa thinks the Llosydanes will—”

Apparitor made a fist against the wall, slow, seismic, holding himself back. Baru saw there were already four bloody commas in the warped pine. Oh. He hadn’t gnawed his knuckles open. He’d been battering himself against the ship as he counted off the dead.