I glanced sideways and saw the priest’s wife, still scarfed and robed despite the weather. She was alone. Her face, what I could see of it, tilted up at me out of the tightly drawn circle of the scarf that covered her below the mouth and above the brow. It was beaded with sweat from the unaccustomed heat but didn’t seem unconfident. She had scraped her hair back so that not a trace made it past the cloth. She was very young, probably not long out of her teens. She was also, I realised, several months pregnant.

I turned away, mouth suddenly tight.

Focused on the view beyond the deck rail.

“I’ve never travelled this far south before,” she went on, when she saw I wasn’t going to take her up on her first gambit. “Have you?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it always this hot?”

I looked at her again, bleakly. “It isn’t hot, you’re just inappropriately dressed.”

“Ah.” She placed her gloved hands on the rail and appeared to examine them. “You do not approve?”

I shrugged. “It’s got nothing to do with me. We live in a free world, didn’t you know? Leo Mecsek says so.”

“Mecsek.” She made a small spitting sound. “He is as corrupt as the rest of them. As all the materialists.”

“Yeah, but give him his due. If his daughter ever gets raped, he’s unlikely to beat her to death for dishonouring him.”

She flinched.

“You are talking about an isolated incident, this is not—”

“Four.” I held out my fingers, rigid in front of her face. “I’m talking about four isolated incidents. And that’s just this year.”

I saw colour rise in her cheeks. She seemed to be looking down at her own slightly protruding belly.

“The New Revelation is not always most honestly served by those most active in its advocacy,” she murmured. “Many of us—”

“Many of you cringe along in compliance, hoping to peel something of worth from the less psychotic directives of your genocidal belief system because you don’t have the wit or nerve to build something entirely new. I know.”

Now she was flushing to the roots of her painstakingly hidden hair.

“You misjudge me.” She touched the scarf she wore. “I have chosen this. Chosen it freely. I believe in the Revelation, I have my faith.”

“Then you’re more stupid than you look.”

An outraged silence. I used it to crank the flurry of rage in my own chest back under control.

“So I’m stupid? Because I choose modesty in womanhood, I’m stupid. Because I don’t display and cheapen myself at every opportunity like that whore Mitzi Harlan and her kind, because—”

“Look,” I said coldly. “Why don’t you exercise some of that modesty and just shut your womanly little mouth? I really don’t care what you think.”