"You’ll be tender, Mr. Sack," he had said. "And even when you’re well, I want to warn you: some of the cuts I’ve made, some of the wounds, they may heal hard. They might scar. In that case, I want you not to be downhearted or disappointed. Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole."

"A fortnight, lad," Tanner said, "before I’m back at work, he reckons. If I practice and all."

But Tanner had an advantage the doctor had not considered: he had never learned to swim. He did not have to adjust a flailing, inefficient, slapping paddle into the sinuous motion of a sea dweller.

He sat by the dockside while his workmates greeted him. They were surprised, solicitous, and friendly. Bastard John the dolphin broke surface nearby, glaring at Tanner with his liquid, piggy eyes and emitting what were doubtless insults in his imbecilic cetacean chittering. But Tanner was not cowed that morning. He received his colleagues like a king, thanking them for their concern.

At the border of Garwater and Jhour ridings, there was a space in the fabric of the city, between vessels: a patch of sea that might have housed a modest ship formed a swimming area. Only a very few of the Armadan pirates could swim, and in such temperatures, few would try. There were only a handful of humans swimming in that patch of open sea, brave or masochistic.

Under the water, slowly, nervous of his new buoyancy and freedom, over hours that day and the next and next, Tanner spread his arms and hands, opening out the webs of skin and capturing the water, pushing himself forward in inexpert bursts. He kicked out in something like a breaststroke, those still-sore toes flexing, painful and powerful. The little presences he could not see or feel beneath his skin pulsed infinitesimal glands and lubricated his sweat.

He opened his eyes and learned to close only his inner eyelids-an extraordinary sensation. He learned to see in the water, unconstrained by any unwieldy helmet, any iron and brass and glass. Not peering through a porthole, but looking out freely, peripheral vision and all.

Slowest and most frightening of all, alone-who could possibly teach him?-Tanner learned to breathe.

The first inrush of water into his mouth closed his windpipe reflexively, and his tongue clamped back and his throat tightened and blocked the route to his stomach, and the seawater scored its way through his tender new pathways, opening him up. He tasted salt so totally it became quickly insensible. He felt rills of water pass through him, through his neck, his gills, and Godspit and shit and all he thought, because he felt no need to breathe.