One of the guards leaned against the base column of the gantry, sucking at a vape tube poking up from her shoulder. Blowing clouds, one hand idly resting on the grip of her rifle as it dangled from its sling. Nothing in her eyes. Eiko did not know this guard’s real name. The other guards called her “Monk.” She never spoke, but Eiko had picked things up: South African Limited Governance Area Mercenary, Paris Protectorate Legionnaire in the Ivory Coast LGA. She was always in gray. The rifle, a sidearm, a knife along the thigh. Lots of gear on her belt. Restraints and stun rod, but also things Eiko couldn’t identify.

The guards all liked their gear. They had a hodgepodge of rifles, sidearms, knives—they loved their knives. Loved to talk about where they had bought them. Loved to talk about when they had used them. The guards’ outfits were all tech materials, zippers, and hidden pockets. Although they wore no standard uniform, their custom outfits all ended up looking the same.

And although they had all come from different backgrounds, they all ended up looking the same, too: the men big, protein-swollen, bearded, loud-talking. The ones who still had their hair wore it long. The ones who didn’t shaved their heads.

The men were, all of them, bullies. They hit out with their rifle butts, they laughed loud and shoved each other.

The women were different. The women were silent, short-haired. They kept their eyes half-closed, as if it made them less vulnerable. They were harder than the men.

There were eight guards Eiko had seen. Six men, two women. Could be more, but he didn’t think so. The ship was big, but not that big. He had been on board seventy-four days. In that time, he had seen only these eight guards. He knew most of their names. He knew their habits. He knew something of their histories.

Because he had no terminal, no pen, no paper, he kept this information in the memory palace he had built in his mind. His memory palace was a Japanese inn. Not just any inn: it was the Minaguchi-ya, on the Tokaido Road, between Tokyo and Kyoto. Eiko had never visited the Minaguchi-ya, but he had read an ancient book, by a gaijin from the old American States named Oliver Statler. The book had detailed the Minaguchi-ya: every room of the place, over all the generations of its operation.

In those remembered rooms and times, Eiko placed the names of the guards. And in those rooms he placed all the details he knew of the ship: the approximate height of the gantry, the shapes of the Thai letters on its side, though he could not know their meaning, the shape of the locks on the doors, the number of steps from the cage-windowed barracks where he and the others were kept when they were not working under guard.