So much of that information was useless now: the movements and habits of guards who were dead, the layout of a ship that he had long ago become familiar with. But it all remained with him. He knew he would never use the Minaguchi-ya as his memory palace again—but he also knew he could not forget the things he had hidden there.

“What I would like to build,” Indra said, “is a forgetting palace. A place where I can put the things I don’t want to remember anymore.”

“It’s important to remember things. It is who we are.”

Indra looked up at him. His eyes were red from prolonged crying. “Yes. That is why I need the forgetting palace. Because I don’t want to be the person carrying these memories around anymore. I have so many things I need to forget. Do you remember the Monk? I said it was quick, with her—a slashed throat, and that was all. But I lied. It wasn’t quick. The others were too cowardly to advance with me, and so I crept up on her alone. And I didn’t have a knife: I had an iron bar. You remember it. My first blow was glancing because she heard me and turned around. Instead of hitting her in the back of the head, I hit her in the temple.”

“You don’t need to relive this,” Eiko said.

“No, it’s you who doesn’t want to hear it. But I need to tell it. Have you ever seen someone’s eye come out of their head? Have you ever had to smash someone’s face in until there is nothing left of them? Until they stop moving? While they gasp and choke on their teeth and blood?”

Eiko felt the sickness in his stomach again. There would be nothing left to bring up but bile.

“I was a nautical engineer, before all of this. This—” He gestured around them, to the darkened, sweat-stinking barracks lurching in the storm. “This world didn’t exist. It was a story in the news. A story I clicked past without reading. Autotrawlers crewed by slave crews. Another world, a degraded shadow of our own. How was I to know there was a hole in the world that I could fall through, like falling through an open manhole? That I could fall right through that story in the news, and end up on the other side, on a planet I don’t even recognize? And become a person I don’t recognize.”

“This was always there,” Eiko said, “underneath it all.”

The foundation of it all. The truth of it.

“Yes. But how do we get out? And if we did get out, how would we ever forget what we have had to do here?”

“Time will do it.”