Still, twice now I have tried to see him, to understand what it was he did. Twice I have knocked and had him open the door to me, and stare at me unspeaking as if I am a stranger. And both times my words have gone sour in my mouth.

There is no "it,"I remember Silas Fennec scolding me.

It is probably the best advice.

Right now, there are a small handful of possibilities that can explain what happened. Any of them might be true. And if Doul were to claim innocence of all of them, I would have less to make sense with, less than I have now. I would have to contemplate the possibility that there was no plan-that there is nothing to be explained.

Why would I risk that? Why in the world would I relinquish what understandings I have?

Tanner Sack came to my rooms. Angevine waited for him below on the Chromolith ’s deck. Her treads could not take my stairs.

I am sure that they are a comfort to each other. But what I heard between them was uncertain and careful, and I think they will move apart. Sharing loss, I suspect, will not be enough.

Tanner brought me a heliotype he had found: of Shekel, holding two books, grinning outside the library. Tanner has decided that everything to do with Shekel and books is mine. I am embarrassed. I don’t know how to tell him to stop.

After he left, I looked at the sepia scrap he had left me. It was not a good print. Vague suggestions of architecture and biology burnt onto the paper, scarring it. Wounding it and healing it in a new configuration. Scars are memory.

I carry my memories of Armada on my back.

I took the dressings off some weeks ago, and with angled mirrors I have seen what Garwater has written on me. It is a breathtakingly ugly message, in a brutal script.

Contours ridge my back, lines stretched horizontal across it, roughly parallel, where the whip landed. They seem to emerge from one side of my back, break my skin, and descend on the other.

Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.

I look at them with wonder. It is as if they are nothing to do with me. Armada is sewn fast onto my back, and I know that I will carry it with me everywhere.

So many truths have been kept from me. This violent, pointless voyage has been sopping with blood. I feel thick and sick with it. And that is all: contingent and brutal without meaning. There is nothing to be learnt here. No ecstatic forgetting. There is no redemption in the sea.

Carrying it on my back, I will take Armada home with me.

Home.

The second time Doul found me at his door, he must have seen something in my face. He nodded once and then spoke.