We docked in the hour when the Bone City pretended it could still be ordinary.
Sable took the lead wrap and the clerk's list without ceremony. The broken child went to a dead-room under the high seat, the same kind of stone belly Orin used on the plain. Mei sent the archive's new rumor into Twin Petal ears before the archivists could invent a prettier one. Rhea's next chip arrived wet and irritated. The two Phoenix hulls had found the platform empty of song and were holding the storm edge like dogs that had missed a meal.
"Sleep," Elizabeth said again, and this time she made it an order with a door.
I slept. Not well. The thread sulked. In the bad stretch between dark and lighter dark I dreamed the keel-eyes opening in the compound well. I woke to Vale's boot against the cot frame.
"Barge has a heading," she said. "Seris says it is calling itself *Good Weather* this week. It is not."
The hour we had been promised was not an hour. It was a wash and a piece of bread.
