When she brushed through the curtains, touching against them, she realized they were great folds of skin, hanging like dewlaps, the wall almost shingled with them. They were warm and pliable to the touch and smelled of honey. She dug her fingers under one, trying to explore where it met the wall, and felt it twitch at her touch. She released it quickly and went to examine the other features of the room, particularly the one that her body was urging her to find.

The toilet was the usual shape, although also made of living flesh, which made it a very odd experience, and there was no shower that she could discern in the strange little subchamber that was the bathroom, its walls colored pale blue and bruise purple. A mechanical fresher unit squatted in one corner, its metal and straight lines an odd contrast to the irregular curves of the fleshy walls it had been installed in. The material of the wall around the machine was lined with some sort of rubbery plastic that she suspected was intended to keep it from irritating the ship’s body with its foreign presence.

She wondered what the appeal of such a ship was to Arpat Takraven. Was it anything more than very very expensive and very very fast? She suspected not but you never knew what appealed to one person’s psyche.

She put the two cases holding her gear on a shelf and looked around. It was the strangest ship she’d ever been in, but hardly the most unwelcoming. Some would have found the silent warmth underfoot unsettling, but she was used to barefoot ship life, the kind she had known aboard the Merribelle, where everyone knew everyone, and things were kept clean, and everyone had shared their germs already.

She said out loud, “I’m ready. Will you take me to meet with the others now?”

“Yes,” the ship replied. The ball of light reappeared in front of her. It hung a few inches away from her face, as though examining her, before it moved back to the door.

She found the others in a great chamber, its walls veined in blue and silver, throbbing as the liquids within them coursed through the ship. The new inhabitants clustered in the center, seeking shelter in one another, although Lolola stood off a little ways from the rest, as though feeling even more of a stranger at the sound of their mutual conversations.

“We are ready to depart now,” she told the ship.

Silence again before the ship said, with an edge that Niko could not help but read as sullen, “Amounts of debris and the chance of explosion have forced me to remove this vessel from the station’s vicinity. Departure is already under way.”

“Good,” she said, relieved. “Let us know when we are away from the station and clear of danger.”