"You can learn from this, Miss Coldwine," he added. "At sea, you can’t waste time. Remember that: don’t wait."

Bellis sat on a little longer, but there was nothing at all that she could do, so she thinned her lips and left.

She stood for a long time under Iron Bay’s cold sky. The stars were invisible; the moon and its daughters, its two little satellites, were unclear. Bellis walked, tense against the chill, and climbed the short ladder to the ship’s raised front, heading for the bowsprit.

Bellis held on to the iron railings and stood on the tips of her toes. She could just see out, across the lightless sea.

Behind her the sounds of the crew faded. A way off, she could see two guttering red pins of light: a torch on the bridge of a prison-ship, and its twin in the black surf.

From the crow’s nest, or from somewhere in the rigging, from some indistinct spot a hundred feet or more above her, Bellis heard a strain of mouth-music. It was not like the imbecilic shanties she had heard in Tarmuth. It was slow and complex.

You will have to wait for your letter, Bellis mouthed silently across the water. You will have to wait to hear from me. You’ll have to wait a little while longer, until cray-country.

She watched the night until the last lines of division between shore, sea, and sky were obscured. Then, cosseted by darkness, she walked slowly aft, toward the constricted doorways and stooped passages leading to her cabin, a scrap of space like a flaw in the ship’s design.

(Later the ship moved uneasily, in the coldest hour, and she stirred in her bunk and she pulled the blanket up to her neck, and she realized somewhere below her dreams that the living cargo was coming aboard.)

I am tired here in the dark and I am full of pus.

My skin’s taut with it, stretched till it puckers nor can I touch it without it rages. I’m infected. I hurt where I touch and I touch everywhere to make sure that I hurt that I’m not yet numb.

But still thank whatever makes these veins mine I’m full of blood. I worry my scabs and they brim I brim with it. And that’s a small comfort nor mind the pain.

They come for us when the air’s so still and black without not a seabird cries. They open our doors and shine lights, uncovering us. I am almost ashamed to see how we have surrendered, we’ve surrendered up to filth.

I can see nothing beyond their lights.

Where we lie together they beat us apart, and I wrap my arms around the spastic matter that twitches in my midriff as they begin to herd us.

We wind through tarry passages and engine chambers and I’m all cold to know what this is for. And I’m more eager, I’m quicker than some of the old ones bent double coughing and spewing and afraid to move.