POV: tress
Summary
The narrator opens by reversing his earlier joke. He had claimed to know none of the Dougs' names; that was a writer's convenience, he says. Every person has a story, Dougs included, and the one who has just died had one. His name was Pakson. He had a sister also serving on the Song. On land he had been tall and awkward, with legs that always looked a little too large for his torso, and he had been balding very young, his neck running more or less straight into his chin. He had also been unaccountably kind: the Doug who had kept checking on Tress as she clung to the rail before Fort hauled her up, the Doug who had thanked Fort for the food no matter how bad it was, the one who had always wanted to learn music and never had. The narrator wishes he had been in the right frame of mind, that year, to have offered him lessons. Now he has fallen. The crew give the body to the spores and the Song sails on.
Tress feels responsible. If she had not pressed for the Crimson passage, the ship might not have been out here at all; she is afraid Pakson will not be the last to die of her recklessness. She retreats to her cabin and the distracting comfort of her spores and flare work. Huck is there as always, riding the worktable beside her and talking — about how much rats can smell that humans cannot, about how every shoe smells different, about a man he once tracked through a crowd by sniffing for the leather of his boots. She lets the rat-tales wash over her like distant weather; they happened far away, they are personal but somehow abstract, and they help her think about something other than the man she has killed.
On the table in front of her she is building variants of her modified flare: four flares with different amounts of verdant aether in each roseite core, four charges with different amounts of zephyr for propulsion. Each combination noted in a notebook. Up on deck the Dougs are needing something to do too, and are fishing gulls out of the air for the next several meals; birds are rare on the Crimson, so you take them when you can. Privately she works through the same moral arithmetic the narrator does on her behalf: how many lives is she willing to risk to save one man. At what point does the crew's good outweigh Charlie's. The narrator declines to call the problem unfair for a window-washer to face. A simple labour, he notes, often leaves a great deal of time for thought; and it is a strange feature of his profession's society that the people who sell their bodies are looked down on while the people who lease out their minds are not.
She needs to test the flares. Huck suggests the empty cargo hold, since the topdeck is too exposed, and she covers her trip down by telling Laggart she would like to inspect Ann's roseite hull patch in case it teaches her something about patching the Song in the future. It is not the most plausible lie but Laggart simply assumes she is making work to take her mind off Pakson and gives his permission, even promising to keep anyone from disturbing her. The exchange is so cordial that she briefly wonders whether something is wrong with him. As she descends, a lookout calls a rainline from the rigging; this one swerves and vanishes without coming near the ship.
In the hold she latches the trapdoor, sets out three oil lamps — more than a common sailor would dare leave burning in a dry hollow piece of firewood — and loads her first flare and charge. Huck does not run, though he does cower in her hair, which she has been wearing loose lately for the small private pleasure of it. She lifts the gun toward the empty aft of the hold and pulls the trigger. The hammer strikes; the zephyr in the charge bursts pale blue; the flare pops out the muzzle, flies about a foot, and nose-dives straight into the deck planks. She has, she notes, used too little zephyr. Unfortunately for her dignity the rest of the design is sound: the impact drives the silver tip back into the roseite core, the core breaks, the water hits the verdant aether, and a knot of vines erupts and seizes her before she has stopped laughing at the misfire — lifting her two feet off the floor in a tight green trellis.
No pain, no injury, only humiliation. Huck scampers over the vines asking if she is all right and she begins to laugh — a snorting, hiccuping laugh that the narrator calls validated by being ridiculous. In that moment, the last of her spore fear leaves her. She is wrapped in the thing she has spent her life being told to fear, she has made a small mistake, and the worst result is a brief stint as a grape trellis. Huck fetches her the silver knife. While he climbs back up she notices the growing tips of the vines turning toward her again as they had in her cabin — and discovers, by thinking firmly that they should not, that they pull away. Already-grown vines stay put; the control is over the live edge. She has to cut the rest free.
She loads more zephyr into the remaining charges and runs the next three experiments. Two work exactly as designed, erupting where she aimed. With the last she thinks at the vines while they grow, willing them not to grab anything — and they stretch toward her instead, then collapse harmlessly in a heap on the floor. One of the four flares fails to ignite at all, which troubles her: she cannot afford a dud when she faces Crow. She spends the rest of the afternoon cutting down vines and dumping them out her porthole, hides the incriminating gear back in her cabin — chastising herself for having left the door unlocked when she went down — and then goes to help Fort with dinner, where she is a distracted assistant. She has a weapon now. A real one. And she is going to give Crow exactly what Crow has been looking for: someone who does not fear the spores.