Ropes twanged and snapped. Above them, with ponderous creaking malice, Cheetah’s second mast collapsed across the deck. The impact punched the stern further below water. Thin sheets of seawater jetted through the window.

The Enact-Colonel Osa was shouting, too far away, “PRINCE! PRINCE BOSOKA!”

Tau-indi grimaced at the cut, and pawed for Iraji’s hand. “I must confess,” they said, “that I didn’t lock us in here completely out of trust in trim.”

“Don’t, don’t admit you’re not a fanatic, I was just starting to understand you—”

“People are many things,” they said, seizing Iraji’s hand. “When I had the door shut behind us, I thought to myself, Baru Cormorant is an Imperial agent. And they always have another way out.”

“And here,” Baru gasped, dragging the dining table over to Iraji and the Prince, “I thought you were mad.”

“Trim is nothing but other people,” Tau-indi said, and cried against the pain. “I don’t think I can swim like this.”

“I’m getting you both out of here,” Baru promised.

“You won’t leave the boy?”

“Never again,” she snapped, without thinking.

They had to sink faster than the ship. To get out through the stern windows, they had to go down. Descent was the hardest part of diving. The body wants to float, so the ascent goes easily—but when you dive, when you go deep, you are fighting against your nature. Like running downhill.

Baru tore open the casks of sweet wine, poured them empty, and hammered them shut again. Every blow made her scream a little from her fingers: she went on anyway.

“My vintages,” Tau said, mournfully. “I was quite sentimental about that one.”

“They’re for flotation. Now I need ballast.”

“Try the curtain rods—”

“Perfect.” She seized the heavy rods from their mounts above the windows and lashed them to the table. “When I open the windows,” she grunted, hauling at the knots, “the sea is going to flood in and trap us in a bubble of air. We need to dive—down there, through the windows—then kick free of the ship’s suction and get back to the surface.”

A cell of hive glass popped from the window frame. Water jetted in.

Baru and Tau looked at each other in dismay.

Another cell popped, and another, and from the stern the sunroom began to flood.

“I’m going to tie you to the table,” Baru snapped, “here, quick—trust me—”

“Of course, of course, every time a woman’s tied me to a table, it’s been grand.”

“Don’t flirt with me! I’m trying to save you!”

“I’m trying to encourage you!” the Prince said, laughing, and the laugh must have jarred their wound: they groaned and swore in Uburu, “Oh, fuck a noma face!”