One of her teeth was cracked open, and pieces came away as she pulled at it. That was where she had bit down on the wooden gag they had given her.

She moved, and the cloth shifted against the scabs on her torn-up back, and she hissed in pain.

Doul stood behind her, his presence like an imperfection in the glass. She wanted him to leave, but she could not bear to address him. Bellis hobbled around her room on fever-weak legs. She could feel the gauze sticking to her back, where her injuries had wept.

The pain in her back was unpleasant and constant, but it did not vary much. Bellis treated it like white noise, ignoring it until it became a kind of aching nothing to her. She stood on her doorstep and looked all around her, at the airships and birds, the light wind mindlessly knocking Armada’s walls. There was industry, men and women working furiously, as there had been on the first day, when she had drawn the curtains of Chromolith Smokestacks and seen her new city.

Something was new, she realized slowly. The air was different, the way the city rode the currents… the sea itself. The ships surrounding Armada no longer meandered on their own routes from horizon to horizon: the mass of vessels (still marked by war) were in tight formation behind the city, as if afraid of losing it.

There was something different about the sea.

She turned to stare at Doul.

"You’re free," he said, not without gentleness, "and superfluous. Kruach Aum hasn’t needed you for a long time. You’ll need to heal. For the city’s sake, any information about your accidental role in the war has been suppressed. I’m sure the library would take you back…"

"What’s happened?" said Bellis in the plaintive croak her beating and sickness had left her. "Something’s different about… everything. What’s happened?"

"Two days ago," said Doul, "insofar as one can be exact, we passed through something. Everyone can feel it. The fleet…" He pointed at the vessels behind the city. "They’re having a difficult time. There are strange currents. Their engines are untrustworthy.

"We’ve passed out of the Swollen Ocean," he said, and gazed at her impassively. "We’re in the outskirts of a new sea. This…" The quick thrust of his arm took in the water, horizon to horizon. "This is the Empty, the Hidden Ocean."

So far from home,thought Bellis, surprising herself with fury. Further and further they’re taking us, me, further and further. They get their way. She heard a ringing inside her like tinnitus. Everything we’ve done-right and wrong-means nothing. They took us here so easily, to this fucked-up empty edge of sea no ship can cross. In we go, and my home is gone.