THIRTY-FIVE

As we steered into the village harbour and I looked around me, the sense of déjá vu was so overpowering, I could almost smell burning again. I could almost hear the panicked screams.

I could almost see myself.

Get a grip, Tak. It didn’t happen here.

It didn’t. But it was the same loosely-gathered array of hard-weather housing backing up from the waterfront, the same tiny core of main-street businesses along the shoreline and the same working harbour complex at one end of the inlet. The same clutches of real-keel inshore trawlers and tenders moored along the dock, dwarfed by the gaunt, outrigged bulk of a big ocean-going rayhunter in their midst. There was even the same disused Mikuni research station at the far end of the inlet and, not far back behind, the crag-perched prayer house that would have replaced it as the village’s focal point when the project funding fell through. In the main street, women went drably wrapped, as if for work with hazardous substances.

Men did not.

“Let’s get this over with,” I muttered.

We moored the dinghy at the beach end where stained and worn plastic jetties leaned in the shallow water at neglected angles. Sierra Tres and the woman who called herself Nadia Makita sat in the stern while Brasil and I unloaded our luggage. Like anyone cruising the Millsport Archipelago, Boubin Islander’s owners had laid in appropriate female clothing in case they had to put in to any of the Northern arm communities, and both Tres and Makita were swathed to the eyes. We helped them out of the dinghy with what I hoped was equally appropriate solicitude, gathered up the sealwrap bags and headed up the main street. It was a slow process—Sierra Tres had dosed herself to the eyes with combat painkillers before we left the yacht, but walking in the cast and flex-alloy boot still forced on her the gait of an old woman. We collected a few curious looks, but these I attributed to Brasil’s blond hair and stature. I began to wish we’d been able to wrap him up too.

No one spoke to us.