It had been a forlorn, miserable time. Never one with many close friends, those that she had she had been too afraid to seek, in case of incriminating them, or in case they had been bought. She remembered her frantic preparations, her furtive deals and dubious sanctuaries. New Crobuzon had been a dreadful place then, she remembered. Oppressive and coldly tyrannical.

"So I made plans. I realized… I realized that I had to leave. I had no money and no contacts in Myrshock or Shankell; I had no time to organize. But the government pays you to go to Nova Esperium." Silas began to nod slowly. Bellis jerked her head in a desultory laughing motion. "So one branch of government was hunting me, while another was processing my application to leave and discussing pay. That’s the advantage of bureaucracy. But I didn’t have long to play games like that with them, so I took passage on the first ship I could. I learnt Salkrikaltor Cray to do it.

"Two years? Three?" She shrugged. "I didn’t know how long it would be till I’d be safe. Ships come from home at least annually to Nova Esperium. My contract was five years, but I’ve broken contracts before. I thought I’d stay until they forgot, till some other public enemy or crisis or whatever took over their attention. Until I got word that it was safe to go back-there are people who know where… where I was going." She had been about to say where I am. "And so…" she concluded.

They looked at each other for a long time.

"So that’s why I ran away."

Bellis thought of the people she had left, the few people she had trusted, and was suddenly and briefly overwhelmed by how much she missed them.

These were strange circumstances. She was a fugitive, eager, desperate to return to the place she had fled. Well, she thought, in all plans, circumstances intervene. She smiled with cold humor. I tried to leave the city for a year or two, and circumstances intervened-some things happened-and instead I find myself trapped for the rest of my life as a librarian in an itinerant pirate city.

Silas was subdued. He seemed moved by what she had told him, and she studied him and knew that he was thinking over his own story. Neither of them were self-pitying. But they had come to be here through no fault or design of their own, and they did not wish to stay.

There were minutes more silence within the room. Outside, of course, the subdued puttering from the hundreds of engines that dragged them south continued. And the glottals of waves continued; and the other sounds-city noise, night noise.