If the Lovers who run my life wanted to get hold of you so badly, Johannes, she thought to herself as she scribbled the classmarks of his works, then I’m going to get inside their minds. Let’s see what they’re so excited about.

One of the books was on loan, but copies of the others were available. As an employee of the library, Bellis had borrowing rights.

It was very cold as she made her way home past the crowds, under jabbering Armada monkeys in the rigging, over the swaying walkways and decks and raised streets of the city, over the waves that slopped between vessels. The sky was raucous with catcalls. In her bag, Bellis carried Predation in Iron Bay Rockpools; Sardula Anatomy; Essays on Beasts; Theories of Megafauna; and Transplane Life as a Problem for the Naturalist -all by Johannes Tearfly.

She sat up late curled close to her stove, while freezing clouds diffused the moonlight outside. She read by lamplight, skipping from book to book.

At one in the morning she looked out over the dark shipscape.

The halo of boats that ringed the city still dragged it onward.

She thought of all the Armadan boats at sea, the agents of its piracy, taxing the ships and communities they passed. Ranging for months across thousands of miles, until, laden down with booty, and even as their city moved, they made their way back by arcane methods.

The city’s nauscopists watched the sky, and knew from its minute variations when vessels were approaching, so the tugs could haul Armada away and out of sight. Sometimes the evasion failed, and foreign ships were intercepted, welcomed in to trade, or hunted down. By secret science, the authorities always knew when incoming vessels were Armada’s own, and welcomed them home.

Even so late there were still sounds of industry from some quarters, cutting through the beat of waves and animals’ night calls. Between the layers of rope and wood that overlaid her view like scratches on a heliotype, Bellis could see to the little bay of boats at the aft end of Armada, where the rig Sorghum wallowed. For weeks, fire and thaumaturgic wash had billowed up from the tip of its stack. Every night the stars had been effaced around it in a drab, dun light.

No more. The clouds above the Sorghum were dark. The flame was out.

For the first time since she had arrived in Armada, Bellis dug through her belongings and brought out her neglected letter. She faltered as she sat there by the stove, the paper folded in front of her, a fountain pen poised. And then, irritated with her own hesitation, she began to write.

Even as Armada made its slow way south toward warmer waters, for a few days the weather turned hard cold. Winds blew frost in from the north. The trees and ivy, the slim gardens that adorned the decks of boats, became brittle and blackened.