He knew the ship’s details down to the processing deck, the flash-freeze factory, the ports and rails. He had studied the thick, opaque, hardened glass of the wheelhouse, and its reinforced steel plate door, beyond which lay the ship’s AI—its mind full of sonar, full of maps of banks and shoals, trawling methods and market prices.

Stenciled over the armored steel door of the wheelhouse, in English, was: WOLF LARSEN, CAPTAIN. When Eiko had asked about the name, one of the other crew members—one of the other slaves—had laughed bitterly. “It’s a joke. A reference to some old book or movie. But there’s nothing behind that door but the AI core. It controls the engines and the navigation. It decides where we go, and when. It follows the fish and the profit. It decides when we dock, too—but it won’t matter to you, kid. When we dock, they lock us up below where nobody can hear us. The processing room where they keep us is right next to one of the freezers. Sometimes we’re down there for days. You’ll come to understand what cold means then. Believe me, it’s better out here.”

The crew member’s name was Thomas. He’d said he was from London. He had been abducted in Pago Pago, where he’d been doing graduate research. He and Eiko had begun a friendship that day that continued while they lay in their polynet hammocks in the barracks, eating the compressed cakes of fish protein and vitamin supplements the Sea Wolf fed them with.

On day twenty-eight of the time Eiko had been aboard, the Sea Wolf was hit by a Pacific storm. A slack line went taught and struck Thomas in the chest, sending him overboard into the gray roil.

Gone.

Eiko saved Thomas’s name, placing it in a twentieth-century room of the Minaguchi-ya, where glass doors were slid open to the cool greenness of the inn’s garden, the sound of the sea, and the busy hum of the bustling Tokaido Road.

One of the conveyor belts jammed. The Monk walked over as a crew member worked to get it running again. But before she moved, she thumbed the safety of her rifle off, glanced to her three and nine, swiveled to her six.

Always ready, this one. Not easy to get by her, if the time ever came.

As he lay in his hammock that evening, wrapped in his recycled plastidown blankets, watching the day die, heavy flakes of sleet drifting like ash into the barracks through the window’s rusted grid, Eiko carefully placed that information in a stone lantern in the Minaguchi-ya’s garden, in the Tokugawa era.

Chapter 8