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Tress comes back to herself flat on the deck, goggles blown off her face, sure that the noise around her must be screaming — until she realises it is Ann laughing so hard she can barely stand. Her cheek is sore but, miraculously, still attached. A single bead of sweat under the rim of her goggles had caught a mote or two of zephyr spores; mercifully a mote or two is all that touched her. Ann gets the Doug who set Tress to the job to clean up the mess and helps her — still unsteady — down to the middle deck to see the ship's surgeon.

On the way Tress asks how a cannon doesn't simply explode along with the spores. Ann cheerfully tells her that it does — that's how the ball gets out. Tress resolves to think about that later. Up by the mess they reach a door that had been closed on Tress's earlier wandering, and Ann steers her inside. The room is lined with cabinets and drawers. Behind a counter stands a man in a suit she has never seen the cut of — black, pressed, no buttons. He has jet-black hair and features so sharp they seem drawn rather than grown, ashen-grey skin and bloodred eyes. He looks, Tress thinks, like what the underworld would send if it needed a lawyer. She knows she ought to be terrified of him; instead she is awed, certain she is looking at a being from beyond space and time. The narrator, drily, says she is more right than wrong — and adds that this man still has not given him his suit back.

*My!* the man cries, brightly. *What have you brought me, Ann? Fresh meat?* This is Dr. Ulaam. Ann explains the zephyr burn while Tress sits where she is told. Ulaam takes a small jar of salve out of a drawer, compliments her on her very nice eyes, and asks whether she'd care to part with them now — *after you are dead, naturally,* unless she'd rather get the trade over with sooner. He has several fine replacements he could offer. Ann leans in and whispers that he always lowballs his first offer; you can usually get double.

*What*, Tress manages, *are you?* *He's our zombie,* Ann says. Ulaam objects to the term, on grounds of taste and accuracy, but does not deny that he has no heartbeat, that his skin is wet-fish cold, or that he eats people. Only dead ones, he stresses; this makes him no more dangerous than the worms of the earth and the bacteria of decomposition — colleagues, really. He offers Tress the salve. She, deciding that any prank in the offing has already begun, takes it. *Brave or stupid?* Ulaam asks; Ann says they haven't decided yet. He hands her something else to hold while she dabs the salve, and she finds she is holding a human eye — one of his favourites, a deep blue, which he assures her would pair strikingly with her remaining green one. She squeals and drops it; he plucks it from the air without looking. Perhaps, he says cheerfully, another time.

The salve does what he promised. The pain vanishes the instant it touches her cheek, and when he holds up a hand mirror her skin is not even pink. There is no sign of the wound at all. The narrator, by way of background, notes that Ulaam belongs to a species that is virtually impossible to kill — Captain Crow shot him several times the first day he came aboard, an experience he reports as *invigorating* — and that he is, eccentricities aside, the only real source of modern medicine on these seas. The crew put up with him because the rates are reasonable: he asks nothing in payment beyond the occasional otherwise-useless corpse. The narrator also lets slip, in passing, that Ulaam is on this ship because he came looking for him: he had found his old friend in his cursed indisposition, judged him unrescuable, and elected to stay on as ship's surgeon for the sense of adventure — and to write a series of embarrassing letters to mutual friends about Hoid's present condition. He calls back to Tress as she leaves to try not to blow herself up in future — it gives the corpse a metallic taste.

Deposited back on deck near her bucket and brush, Tress is poking at her now-perfectly-healed cheek when Huck comes scampering up. He has news. He'd gone foraging in the hold after she'd sent him away — there is nothing accessible down there that does not require nibbling through a sack, he points out indignantly, and people object to that — and while he was down there Laggart came rifling through the cannon stores. Huck watched him sneak a couple of cannonballs into his pack. It is, Tress decides, time to test her theory. She moves her scrubbing back over near the forward cannon, not too close, and settles in to wait for the cannonmaster. He does not take long.