Silas laughed hollowly. "I didn’t know who on this place to trust. I was trying to get away from here myself, trying to find some way home. It took me a long time to believe that… that there wasn’t any. I thought I could just take the message to New Crobuzon myself. What if you didn’t believe me? Or what if you were a spy? What if you told our new fucking rulers-"

"Well, what about that?" Bellis interrupted. "Isn’t it worth thinking about? Maybe they’d help us get a message…"

Silas stared at her with nasty incredulity.

"Are you mad?" he said. "You think they’d help us? They don’t give spit what happens to New Crobuzon. They’d most likely welcome its fucking destruction-one less competitor nation on the sea. You think they’d let us ride to the rescue? You think they’d care? The bastards would probably do everything they could to hold us back, to let the grindylow do their worst. And, besides, you’ve seen how they treat… Crobuzoner officials and agents. They’d search my notes, my papers, and it would come out that I have a commission. That I work for New Crobuzon. Jabber Almighty, Bellis, you saw what they did to the captain. What do you think they’d do to me?"

There was a long silence at that.

"I needed… I need someone to work with me. We have no friends in this city. We have no allies. And thousands of miles away, our home’s in danger, and we can’t trust anyone to help us. So it’s up to us to get a message back."

After he said that there was a pause that became a silence. It dragged out, longer and longer, and became terrible because they both knew it should be filled. They should be coming up with plans.

And both of them tried. Bellis opened her mouth several times, but words dried in her throat.

We’ll hijack one of their boats, she wanted to say but could not; the idiocy of it choked her. We’ll sneak out just the two of us in a dinghy; we’ll get through the guard boats and row and sail for home. She tried to say that, tried to think it without scorn, and almost moaned. We’ll steal an airship. All we need are guns and gas, and coal and water for the engine, and food and drink for a two-thousand-mile journey, and a map, a chart of where in the godsforsaken fucking middle of the fucking entire Swollen Ocean we are, for Jabber’s sake…

Nothing, there was nothing, she could say nothing; she could think nothing.