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Tress returns to the cabin she inherited from Weev and starts again from scratch — not as a girl playing a role this time, but as a girl with a deadline that means dying. Where before she had only sorted Weev's things to check that none were obviously lethal, now she reads them, organizes them, and tests them. The narrator observes that nothing concentrates the mind quite like a deadline that emphasizes the *dead* part, and that Weev was not, in the end, a person of orderly genius so much as a person whose mind was permanently snagged on the rim of ideas it could not quite reach. His papers are not manuals; they are the loose drift of an enthusiastic hoarder of half-finished thoughts.

In among the scraps she finds a precise schematic of a cannonball — apparently produced by an earlier hand and given to Weev when the captain wanted the Song to manufacture its own ammunition rather than pay zephyr-masters' prices. Weev had clearly been beaten by the design; his frustrated marginalia mostly obscures the diagram. But to Tress the diagram is a revelation. The narrator pauses for a small lecture on the workings of the standard ship-to-ship round: the timing fuse is a clipping of verdant aether that grows at an extremely reliable rate when fed an exactly measured amount of water from a shattered glass vial. The vine pushes a silver-tipped plug through a tube into the heart of the cannonball, where a sphere of roseite surrounded by zephyr spores holds an interior charge of water — wax-lined inside, since wax insulates the spores from the water until the moment of breaking. Silver is the one thing that can wound roseite. The plug breaches the sphere, water meets spores, and the round detonates. (A parenthetical aside notes that verdant vines given water do keep growing afterwards — that is how the seas' farmers turn spent spores into food — but only for a finite span before they exhaust themselves.)

Three aethers in concert, each doing exactly one job: verdant for the fuse, roseite for the water container, zephyr for the bang. A note at the bottom of the diagram — not in Weev's hand — adds that the modern designs have moved past timing fuses entirely: impact detonation charges, the writer says, are the future of artillery. Tress does not know what the phrase means yet. What she does know is that experimenting with zephyr spores is the sort of activity that normally sends sprouters home in many small boxes rather than one big one; she also knows that she is the kind of person who uses oven mitts on pots that have already cooled, and that this combination of curiosity and caution is, the narrator notes, exactly the mix that innovation requires. The schematic carries her further than she had any business going. There is no reason, she thinks, holding the page up, that a thing like this could not be made portable. Not just a gun — a modular spore weapon, more flexible than a pistol. A second note from the earlier hand refers her to a related design for flares, which iterate on the same principle, and she suddenly sees most of the path.

A knock at the door shatters her concentration like a broadside. Tress flings the door open ready to bite somebody's head off, and finds Fort standing in the corridor with a covered plate. She had missed evening mess, his board says; is she all right? She blinks at the porthole and discovers the day is gone — she had been squinting to read without noticing. She thanks him, mortified at how nearly she'd snapped at the one person bringing her dinner, and looks under the lid. The usual crusted slop. When they figure out the right payment, she mumbles, could she maybe start getting some that hadn't been scraped off the bottom of the pot? — at which Fort frowns and writes back that he sets aside servings for her and Hoid first, before he lets the Dougs at it. The realization hits her like a hammer: this is not the leftovers. This is what everyone aboard eats. He explains, embarrassed, that after Weev's death the crew took turns cooking and he turned out to be the least disastrous of a bad lot; Ann's attempt put half of them down for three days. Tress sees a way to repay him for everything he has done since she boarded, and tells him to come fetch her tomorrow before evening mess — she will cook. He warns her the stores are stale, canned, or dried; she tells him to trust her.

Before they can settle anything more, the deck bell rings — not the three heavy strikes of a sighted ship, not the long peal for mess, but two strikes, pause, two strikes. *Border ahead*, Fort writes, practically bouncing. The Crimson Sea has been spotted; does she want to come up and see the crossing? Tress follows him out into the corridor, surprised to feel a small reluctance at leaving her papers. She has never thought of herself as scholarly — her schooling stopped at basic reading and arithmetic; a window-washing girl from the cliffs is no academic — and she puts the reluctance aside. The narrator allows itself one closing line of correction: she had simply never met a subject interesting enough, or dangerous enough, to draw it out.