The only time Eiko and Son had gone aboard the factory ship together with the rest of their crew was for a health inspection. They were pushed and prodded through a maze of cold passageways that eventually led them to a sterile compartment where they were given a machine checkup. Stamped on the side of the checkup machine were the words: PROPERTY AUTOMATED MARINE PROTEIN INDUSTRIES INC.

It was the first sign Eiko had seen of any kind that indicated ownership, responsibility for what was happening to him and the other crew members. It must have been a mistake, leaving it there. Eiko rolled that knowledge into a scroll and placed it in a cricket cage of the Minaguchi-ya.

It was during that trip Eiko saw the man killed. During that trip as well, he caught sight of members of other crews, themselves being shoved and prodded down passageways—all of them defeated and skeletal. They looked worse, he’d thought then, than the crew of the Sea Wolf. But now he was not so sure. It could be they had only looked worse because they were anonymous. He knew the men of his own crew as people, but all he saw of these others, these strangers, were the facts of their bodies.

Maybe the crew of the Sea Wolf looked just as bad. Maybe he looked just as bad.

Son was beaten during their stay at the factory ship, by two Sea Wolf guards, for dropping a slab of frozen yellowfin over the side during unloading. It was a perfunctory beating: when they were doing it, it was clear the guards were holding back. Still, Son had missed his shift the next day with one of his eyes swollen shut, unable to leave his hammock.

Watching the guards carefully beating Son, Eiko had wondered if somewhere there were guards of the guards, people who might punish them if they truly disabled a crew member for no reason. If the guards might be punished for a lost Son, the same way Son was being punished for the lost fish.

There was an economy to be respected in this system of exploitation. Everything had a calculated value, and that value was always less than the value of what was below it on the chain: so, for example, the crew was worth less than the total of fish they could possibly catch. And the ship, with the guards and the crews that would work it over its total operative life had to be, taken together, worth less than the total catch they would take in over that lifetime.