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red-legger, an overweight Rafer whom she did not recognize—a cook, or some other campman, certainly not a swimmer or hunter. She pressed the key into his eager hand.
    She cupped her hands over his ear. “Unlock them all,” she shouted in the Rafer tongue. “The land people first, then the swimmers, then the scuba breathers.” She watched his rolling eyes and wondered if he could act responsibly on the distinction. When he sat forward and unlocked his own cuffs, Tym decided she would have to surrender the matter to him. One person could only do so much.
    The unconscious Fungus Person, unaccountably honored with a Rafer skin painting, would be her responsibility. She placed a foot in the rising water on either side of his chest, positioned the base of each of her palms into his armpits and pushed until his back rose against the rough wood that had been the ceiling before the capsize. Tym was breathing heavily now, the air growing thin of oxygen.
    She kneeled, placed her shoulder against the stranger’s abdomen, and heaved him up. When she was upright, she curled an arm around his right leg, letting the other dangle down her back, and began the awkward stagger, slot divider by slot divider, back toward the dim light of freedom.
     
    The Lucia’s upturned bow point dipped beneath the choppy sea. It went much quicker than Tym had imagined it would. Suddenly, from her standpoint on the wide beach of Dunkin Island, there was nothing but the broad expanse of furiously shifting water under a depressing gray sky.
    Tym was immobile as she watched from the beach, every arm and leg joint screaming with the pain of overexertion. Alternately, she tried to envision the scramble of slaves in the Lucia’s hold and she tried to forget. She could do no more. Her head lay on the rising and falling belly of the rescued Fungus Person, her legs lapped by the surge and ebb of the sea. Pictures of the horror flashed into her mind, and she drove them away again.
    Surge and ebb. She smiled with satisfaction at her cruel use of the tosser disk; she sobered again at the realization of the tormented deaths happening just now, beyond the reach of her depleted body.
    She stared up at the swirl of gray clouds. Again and again she replayed in her mind the scene with Little Tom. The violent capsize, bashing into the wall, the floor exploding and the avalanche of metal ballast bars. Tym pictured herself clawing the bars away, looking for the shackle key. The bars of battered metal she threw aside. And then she remembered the odd detail she had mentally filed away for calmer times: those bars.
    She had supposed the ship’s ballast would be lead, an extremely heavy and common metal. Naturally. But these tons of metal bars had been tossed about, bashed through decking, in a way that no shipbuilder would imagine in the worst of nightmares. The bars were scarred and twisted and beaten, and underneath their dull black surface paint was the unmistakable glint of gold.

11
The Dream Vessel
    Big Tom pressed the tip of his drawing lead into the U-shaped sharpener on the edge of his drafting table. He whittled it to a sharp point. The shavings dittered into a cup screwed just under the sharpener, where they would be collected eventually for remelting.
    With a wad of rubber he erased the line he had just drawn, repositioned his flexible snake rule on the paper, and rechecked the curvature. Ah. Then he drew that segment of the hull line again, satisfactorily thin and precise this time.
    The merchant-shipbuilder faced the open veranda windows of his stilted office building, a perch from which he could watch for ships coming in—the Lucia, ah, that would be a blessing. But the Windon Wait or the Darwip, out to scout for her two days now—word from either of them would do.
    So it was that from this lookout he was likely the first person on the island to see the Darwip heading into harbor from out east—even at such a distance identifiable by its single yellow