But it tells me nothing about the city’s plans. Whatever Armada’s rulers have in mind, I will have to look deeper to find. I will keep reading these books. They are the only clues I have. And I will not thus seek to understand Armada so that I can learn to live happily in my rusting chimney. I will understand where we are going, and why, so that I might leave.

There was a sudden knocking on Bellis’ door. She looked up, alarmed. It was nearly eleven o’clock.

She stood slowly and descended the tight spiral staircase in the center of her circular room. Johannes was the only person in Armada who knew where she lived, and she had not spoken to him since their altercation in the restaurant.

Bellis padded slowly toward the door, waited, and the sharp rapping came again. Was he here to apologize? To rage at her again? Did she even want to see him, to reopen the door to that friendship?

She was still angry with him, she realized, and still somewhat ashamed.

There was a third bout of knocking, and Bellis stepped forward, her face set, ready to hear him out and see him off. When she pulled open the door she stopped short, her mouth hanging with astonishment, her curt admonition whispered away from her with her breath.

Standing on her threshold, huddled against the cold and looking up at her warily, was Silas Fennec.

They sat in silence for a little while, drinking the wine Fennec had brought.

"You’ve done well, Miss Coldwine," he said eventually, looking appreciatively around the battered metal cylinder that was her room. "A lot of us newcomers are in much less attractive places." She raised one eyebrow at him, but he nodded again. "I promise you it’s true. Have you not seen?"

Of course she had not.

"Where are you living?" she asked.

"Near Thee-And-Thine riding," he said, "in the base of a clipper. No windows." He shrugged. "Are these yours?" He pointed to the books on her bed.

"No," she said, and tidied them quickly away. "They only let me keep my notebook. Even books I’d damn well written, they took away."

"Same for me," he said. "All I’ve got left is my journal. It’s the log of years of traveling. I’d have been heartbroken to lose it." He smiled.

"What do they have you doing?" Bellis asked, and Fennec shrugged again.

"I managed to avoid all that," he said. "I’m doing what I want to do. You work in the library, don’t you?"

"How?" she said sharply. "How did you keep them off your back? How do you manage to live?"

He watched her for a while without answering.