Could that be true? Was it even possible? Eiko did not know. It could be something said to scare them. For fun, or out of malice, or out of boredom.

They were two weeks out from the factory ship now. Eiko was worried about Son. Ever since his beating, Son had been acting strange. He didn’t talk of anything except his home islands. As he and Eiko sat playing cards, or when there was a break during a shift, Son talked about Con Dao. But he didn’t reminisce the way he used to, about the dive boats, or cutting old fishing nets off the coral reefs, or about the quiet life of Con Son Town.

Instead, he talked about fish. It was an obsession: the rich hauls of fish inside the protected zone of the archipelago. The way they were bigger there, slower, easier to catch. The sea turtles that could be poached, the sharks. The squid drifting up to the lights of the squid boats at night, haplessly dragged in, ton by inky ton. He avoided looking at Eiko, his battered face tilted off toward the horizon. It was as if he had forgotten his time as a conservationist, his time spent trying to protect his island, and had reverted to his days of poaching.

Eiko would joke with him, try to snap him out of it, but it didn’t work: Son just talked louder.

Meanwhile, the ocean the Sea Wolf moved through was a desert of empty nets, or useless by-catch thrown back into the sea, most of it dead. The Sea Wolf became agitated—Eiko could sense it, like a vibration from beneath the decks, rage emanating from behind the armored bulkhead that shielded the AI mind. The guards drank in this agitation. They became nastier, quicker to anger, more arbitrary in punishments.

Son talked about fat, slow groupers drifting over the coral. He talked about the abundant sharks to be caught, day or night.

They were moving south. That was something, anyway: The days grew warmer. Everything else stayed the same, but the relief from the cold was good. Crew and guards alike tilted their faces up to the sun on deck shifts. But the seas remained empty. The Sea Wolf’s engines growled with impatience.

On a shift they had together Son reminisced about crabbing along the shoreline at night, the crabs as large as dinner plates, stupid and slow.