POV: tress
Summary
Tress has gathered Hoid and Ulaam in the cargo hold for a final field test. She fires one of her modified flares at Ulaam's feet and a writhing mass of verdant vines swallows the surgeon to the neck. Asked whether it will hold Crow, Ulaam gives the verdict she has come for: the spores in the captain's blood guard her against direct physical danger, but they don't object to her merely being immobilised — their needs and hers don't entirely overlap. Better still, the cleverness of the flare is that you don't shoot it *at* her. A charge fired at the deck nearby reads as off-target; the vines may not be intercepted at all. Once Crow is wrapped, no threatening moves should keep the spores quiet. Tress asks whether they could just take her in her sleep instead. Ulaam warns no — her spores cannot judge intent, and would assume the worst.
Tress reaches for her silver knife to cut him out; Ulaam tells her not to bother, the wrapping is quite pleasant, and asks where she got the flares. She made them, she says, working from the schematics in Weev's old papers; this is her tenth shot and so far there has not been a dud. She rummages for the notebook to record the result. When she turns, Ulaam is standing beside her, with the vines in a discarded heap where his body had been. He digested himself free, he explains, in a few key places. He then asks — for her brain, then for her hands, then for any spare ear or knee — and she turns each offer down flatly, without the embarrassment she would have managed weeks ago. She isn't a different person, she tells him; she is simply more desperate. Asked whether she is *more* desperate now than on her first awful days aboard, she has to admit that her capacity for desperation seems to have grown like a trained muscle. Crowding embarrassment out has only made the room.
Pressed on the plan, she confirms that the other officers are with her, and confesses how it happened: she has somehow led Salay and the others to believe she is a King's Mask. *Accidentally,* she grimaces — somehow she is best at lying when she is telling the truth. Hoid takes this as his cue to recite another of his new poems. Ulaam excuses himself by disconnecting his ears for two minutes. He delivers his limerick — a tulip bulb, a farmer with nowhere to plant it, a sudden fit, the bulb mashed to pulp — and recoils, internally, at what he has become. Tress gamely calls it nice. For a girl who claims she is bad at lying, the narrator thinks, she pulls that one off.
She asks Ulaam once more whether he will help in the mutiny. He declines: he can offer medical attention and nothing further. When she reminds him that if the ship sinks in the Crimson he will die with the rest of them, he counters that Hoid is immortal and he is nearly so; walking out across the bottom of the spore sea is, while unpleasant, within his abilities. He climbs the steps and goes. Hoid stands to follow, an aware sliver of him fighting off the urge to ambush Ulaam with more verse, then pauses beside Tress. She is sitting with her flare gun in her lap, looking at the floor.
*I'm terrified,* she tells him quietly. Not only for everyone else — though there is that — but for herself, and for what Crow is going to do to her. She knows, deep down, that she can't beat the captain. Hoid keeps the next bad poem behind his teeth and finds a thin moment of lucidity. He raises a single finger and whispers that she has everything she needs. The flare gun, she asks; but what if she fails? He only repeats it — *you have everything you need* — squeezes her arm, and starts up the stairs.
Halfway up he notices what is wrong. The steady whisper of spores along the hull has stopped: the seethe has paused, and the ship is slowing. Ordinarily a non-event. On the slopes of the Crimson, it means rain is near. The reader, the narrator notes, can guess what happens next.