He woke up with a guilty start. He was a Stakhieczi boy from Aurdwynn and he had exotic skin like chicken sausage. She’d picked him out of sentiment, and paid him extra to stay over. Now the whore boy smiled expertly. She’d ruined his makeup last night, with her hands clawed around his skull and her thumbs digging into his cheekbones. But he was beautiful still, and he wore the ruin well enough.

“I hope you got your money’s worth,” he said, and he stretched to show her the fans of muscle off his shoulders, the arch of his pectorals, the narrow cut of his abs. “You were so good.”

Remember when you thought whores liked you in particular? Because you were kind, and you never beat the shit out of them if they didn’t perform? Give a woman a blackjack and a navy behind her and a man’s strength didn’t matter. And a lot of navy women liked to hit a man who couldn’t hit back.

But now Aminata could hear what he was really saying. It wasn’t I like you. It was, mam, please leave a tip, my pimp takes a big cut.

“Get dressed,” she said. “Don’t make me late.”

He went around collecting his clothes. Aminata got out of bed, unpinned the fly screen on the window, stuck her head outside, and gasped a huge breath of the weather. There was, as the rag novels always said, a storm coming: not a storm of great change and crisis (if only!) but another plow of wet air to bring bad sailing and soggy clothes.

I wish, she told the birds, that I were on a ship. I wish Baru would write back. I wish—I wish—

I wish I knew, for sure, that all this hard work would get me somewhere. Even though I am who I am, a Segu-woman, an Oriati, a tunk, a beachboot, a burner. Even though.

“Big day, mam?” he asked, to fill the silence.

It was a big day. Maybe, with some kind of masculine intuition, he’d felt her urgency last night. Today was the day she had to ease Abdumasi Abd from the resentimente to the attachment. When Abd finally cracked she could be posted to a ship again.

“Oh!” the whore said, delighted: he’d discovered her temple in its little rice-paper house. “This is a trim shrine, isn’t it?”

“Hey!” Aminata lunged. “That’s private!”

Planted in the tufa center-pot of her temple was a cormorant feather, gray on the fringes, tipped with steel-gray and full black, quill-down in Taranoki earth. To her endless guilt Aminata had never tended the flower seeds she’d planted, and they’d died. So the ragged feather was all that stood in her temple. Her stupid little hygiene-approved gesture toward the stupid traditions of her stupid race.