“I think he might listen to you,” Son shouted. “And anyway—it can’t be any worse than this. Let me take over.”

Eiko paused on the ladder up to the fo’c’sle and vomited. It was the combination of the Portuguese man-of-war’s venom and the half rations the crew had been on for a week now. All of them were on the edge of illness and injury.

The ship lurched as the wind changed direction and a massive wave slashed across the bow.

It was dark in the barracks—gray storm light through the barred windows. Indra was handcuffed to a length of chain, itself secured to one of the steel hammock loops in the barracks ceiling. He sat cross-legged on the floor, his head down. In his lap was a bit of oilcloth, with a fish protein cake on it someone had brought him.

He glanced up at Eiko. Indra’s face had been cut above one eyebrow in the struggle to restrain him. Two stitches held the wound together. There was a bruise across one of his cheekbones.

“You look worse than I do,” Indra said.

“You don’t look too bad, for a man who tried to kill himself.”

Indra made a sound that might have been a laugh or a sob. “I should have picked a time when fewer people were around.”

“What you should do is what we are all trying to do: survive this.”

Indra picked at the cake, then folded the oilcloth over the rest of it and set it aside. “Let’s talk about something else. Tell me about your memory palace.”

Eiko had mentioned the palace to Indra in passing—during a conversation in the mess the day after the mutiny, when they had still believed the mutiny had worked.

“I learned about the technique when I was in high school: a way to remember things better. Someone had read a book about it and passed it around. You construct a house, where you store things you want to remember. The associations of the memories with their locations in that house, your ‘memory palace,’ help you not to forget.”

“And yours is a Japanese inn.”