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The morning after Tress talks her way onto the crew, Crow wakes her with a shout instead of a kick — which Tress notes is suspicious of the captain on principle, since Crow is not known for declining opportunities to cause pain. Crow asks again whether her new sprouter is really not afraid of spores. Tress clarifies that she is afraid — it is only that lately everything wants to kill her, so the spores feel like one more item on a crowded list. Crow finds this encouraging in a way that does not feel like a compliment.

They go down to a door on the middle deck with an oversized padlock on it — the kind, the narrator observes, that is meant to make a statement. Crow selects a key from her ring, snicks the lock open with a sound that belongs more to traps than to doors, hands the key to Tress, and notes mildly that the ring still holds a duplicate. Dougs watching from down the hall back away when the door opens. Inside is a long, narrow chamber: bunk with mattress and blanket, worktable under a wall-mounted mirror and a set of drawers, and a single porthole at the end through which the green spores occasionally rise to blot out the daylight. A door in the corner opens onto a stall with a basin, a drain, and a spigot fed from a barrel of water on deck. By Tress's recent standards, the bunk alone is luxury; the prospect of an actual bath is something close to paradise.

Crow explains the rules — work with spores only in this room, fill the zephyr charges for the cannons in here too, the walls are reinforced with aluminum and the hull beyond it is lined with silver in case anything breaks through, and despite all that, careless sprouting could still tear her ship apart. She asks if Tress has any idea what she's signing up for. Tress asks if she really gets the bunk; Crow says yes; she is in. Before leaving, Crow tells her to take a good look at the floor.

Tress sits on the mattress and tries to work out what she means. The floor looks normal — wooden planks, dusty since no one has cleaned in here since Weev died. *Why* hasn't anyone cleaned in here? A bed, a mirror, running water — by ship's standards the Dougs should have been fighting over this room. Then she sees what she should have spotted at once. Everywhere else on the Crow's Song — except a small patch by each cannon — the decks are inset with silver to kill any stray spore. Not in here. The room where the sprouter has to work with live spores has no silver in the floor at all. No wonder no one else wanted it; she'd have to be insane to sleep in here. She lies down and is unconscious almost at once — sleeping on the deck had not actually involved much sleeping.

Huck finds her snoring later and informs her, with grave personal offense, that the ship has acquired an actual cat in answer to one rat — an act of human stupidity he wants on the record. Tress promises to keep him close. *I'm my own brand of idiot for staying on this ship at all*, she admits. She gets up, fetches her sack of cups from above, and begins arranging them on the worktable, thinking of Charlie and the stories he had told her about each one. The guilt of staying to help strangers when she ought to be hunting for him pulls at her. She tries to imagine raising a ransom for him and discovers that no, she cannot stomach being a real pirate to do it — there will have to be some other way.

A peppy voice from the doorway offers a hand. Tress checks that Ulaam hasn't literally brought one; he furtively tucks something behind his back and steps in to brief her on Weev's duties. The bath, he explains, is real — Weev had merely extrapolated the necessary ceramic basin into a personal amenity. Beyond zephyr work for the cannons, she will want to practise growing roseite for emergency hull patches and verdant vines for emergency food, which are, he says cheerfully, edible — anything is, if you are optimistic enough. Hoid peeks in past him, notes the absence of marmosets, and wanders off growling about a rock he once ate.

Tress asks, carefully, about Hoid's condition. Ulaam, poking through Weev's drawers, advises her not to bother — Hoid is as deft at untying knots as he is at making them. Then, half to himself: he ought to have known better than to tangle with the Sorceress. Probably did know better. *The Sorceress?* Tress manages. *Hmm? Yes. What did you think happened to him?* — and adds, by the way, that he doesn't know how Hoid managed it, because he found him already like this after coming to this planet in response to Hoid's letter. *…The planet?* Tress says. *Like, you're from the stars?* Not from a star, Ulaam corrects — a planet that orbits one. Sailors talk more and more of visitors from the stars these days; he doesn't quite count, but close enough.

Tress sits down with the realization landing in stages. There is, on this very ship, a man who has been to the Sorceress and come back alive. Hoid is the route to Charlie. If she had walked off the gangplank in Shimmerbay the night before she would never have known. A real plan finally takes shape: get from the cabin boy whatever he knows about reaching the Sorceress and dealing with her — and, as a side benefit, save the doomed crew who, it is becoming clear, are exactly the kind of people she needs at her back.