I’ve been given a raise,she thought dryly, now that I work for Garwater.

The consciousness of her hidden centrality to all that had happened, the awareness that without her, Armada would not be where it was, doing what it was doing, oppressed her, even though her reasons had been clear and good at every stage.

She walked home not to save money but to experience Armada again. Locked in a room full of incomprehensible conversations all day, she felt herself losing contact with the city around her. And any city, she told herself, is better than none.

The walk took her through Shaddler’s cool, quiet streets and into Garwater via the Tolpandy. Past the quiet bickerings of the monkeys that nested in building sites and rooftops, and deserted berths and the canopy of rigging; past the city’s cats (glancing at her, predatory) and its rare dogs and the masses of rats and the nightwalkers; around hen coops; lifeboats and steam launches rusted into position and remade as flower beds; homes cut into the sides of gun batteries, pigeons cooing from the bore of a twelve-inch gun; under wooden huts built onto foretops and yards which met masts like tree houses; through the light of gas and phlogistic cells and oil lamps; and through darkness tinted in various colors, squeezing along the corridors of damp brick that covered Armada’s vessels like a fur of mold. Back to her rooms in the Chromolith Smokestacks, where Silas Fennec was sitting, waiting for her.

She was shocked by his unclear figure sitting in the dark. She hissed at him, and turned away until her heart had slowed.

He studied her. His eyes were big and calm.

"How did you get in?" she said. He waved the question away like an insect.

"You know your apartment’s still watched," he said. "I can’t exactly come knocking."

Bellis walked over to him. He was motionless except for his face and eyes, tracking her progress. She came close-she came within his space-and leaned toward him slowly, examining him like some scientific specimen. She was ostentatious about it: she inspected him coolly and intrusively. It might have been designed to intimidate, to put him off his ease.

As she bent over him, as if cataloging his aspects, he caught her eye, and for the first time in some weeks, he smiled at her eagerly and openly. She remembered the reasons that she had had for kissing him, and fucking him. Not just loneliness or isolation, though they were paramount. But there were other factors, more centered in him. And although as she stood there she felt not the slightest urge to touch him, although she felt only a ghost of the affection that had once motivated her, she did not regret what had happened.

We both needed it, she thought. And it helped; it really did.