"Oh, the embryos of big ideas-that sort of thing," he said, and smiled at her.

They sat with their backs to an overgrown stump, or perhaps the earth-smothered anatomy of a binnacle. Bellis put Silas’ book away. Still not quite at ease, she leaned in and kissed him.

He responded gently, and an aggression came to her, and she pushed herself into him more firmly. She drew away for a moment, her face set, and looked at him staring back at her with pleasure and uncertainty. She tried to parse him, to understand the grammar of his actions and reactions, and she could not.

But frustrated as she was by that, she felt intimately how his antagonisms mirrored hers. His despite and hers-at Armada, at this absurd existence-had become conjoined. And it was an extraordinary relief and release to share even something as cold as that.

She held his face and kissed him hard. He responded eagerly. When his arm came slowly around her waist, and his fingers crooked and combed her hair, she broke from him and took hold of his hand. She pulled him after her, back through the winding ways of the park, portward, to her home.

In Bellis’ room, Silas watched silently as she undressed.

She draped her skirt, shirt, jacket, and bloomers over the back of her chair and stood stripped bare in the fading light of her window, letting down her scraped-up hair. Silas stirred. His clothes were scattered like seed. He smiled at her again, and she sighed and smiled too, finally, deprecatingly, for what seemed the first time in months. With that smile came an unexpected little stab of shyness, and with the smile it quickly left again.

They were not children; they were not new to this. They did not fumble or panic. She walked to him and straddled him with practiced grace and desire. And when she did, pushing against his cock, when he wrestled his hands out from where she had pinioned them, he knew how to move her.

Passionate; loveless but not joyless; expert; eager. It made her smile again, and gasp and come in a great gout of relief and pleasure. When she lay back in the narrow bed, having taught him how she liked to fuck and learned his own predilections, she glanced up at him (his eyes closed, sweating). She checked herself and verified that she was still lonely, still as numb to this place as ever. She would have been astounded to find it any other way.

But still, but still. Even so. She smiled again. She felt better.

For three days, Tanner lay in the surgery, strapped to the wooden table, feeling the tower and the ship move slowly and slightly beneath him.

Three days. He moved only inches at a time, wriggling against the restraints, shifting slightly to the left or right.

Most of the time he swam in glutinous aether dreams.