The boat crew returned excited and aghast. The shallows around the nearest atoll were infested with some kind of bristling serpent or enormous underwater centipede, which burrowed invisibly into the silt and lurked until a fish came near. Then the lurkers snapped upward like springs, seized the fish in huge crescent jaws, and bit or battered the unfortunate fellow to death. The clouds of gore attracted small sharks, which the worms ate too, and octopodes, who protected themselves with coconut half-shells tucked beneath their bodies.

Baru would very much like to go see the centipedes and the octopodes. But there was no time. Yawa had already begun to move against her.

Baru stopped by the surgery to scrounge hangover remedies and a hot rock, in anticipation of period cramps. She suspected the surgeon was taking small bribes to allow ship’s officers to conduct assignations in the quarantine slots. The Helbride officers had been unexpectedly pleased to take Cheetah’s crew aboard, and Baru hadn’t understood why until she realized the officers could ethically fuck foreign passengers—the Oriati being entirely outside the chain of command.

She’d made a joke. Something about people bringing back diseases from Kyprananoke. And the ship’s surgeon told her, levelly, “No one will go ashore at Kyprananoke except Apparitor and Durance’s handpicked operatives.”

“And me, of course.” Baru selected a smooth round hot-rock.

“No,” the surgeon said, with the faintest quaver, “you will not go ashore at Kyprananoke. After your seizure, I cannot allow it.”

Baru turned slowly, so the man could consider what fury he’d tempted. “On what authority?”

“Mine. I am the ship’s surgeon. I rule everything inside a living skin on Helbride.”

“My service jacket doesn’t have a living skin. And it tells me I can tear up your letters of physic and send you down to pump bilge—”

The surgeon crossed his arms. “I examined you myself. I collected signed eyewitness statements, including the testament of a Clarified expert. You’re epileptic. You are an agent of the Republic; neither by injury nor by neglect may I allow the Republic to come to harm. You will not leave my ship.”

“I have seizures if I’m fucking poisoned!” Baru roared.

“There’s no way I can know poison was involved.”

“You are going to regret this. You are going to regret it so dearly.”

“You won’t have the capacity for regret if you seize again.”

“Why is that.”

“Because I’ll be forced to perform an emergency transorbital.”

Baru flinched and dropped the stone. Phantom steel grated in her eye socket—groped up into her brain—her first instinct was to look around, wildly, for the lobotomy pick, and throw it overboard. But just then Xate Yawa swept in, fully masked in purple-black ceramic and a blood-spattered surgical gown. “One of the wounded from Cheetah died,” she told the surgeon. “I cut him open to try to get at the bleeding, but he was too far gone. The patient in bed six.”