The docking collar gave way to a corridor, and the corridor gave way to Starbase Twelve proper, and Starbase Twelve was a city that had been poured into a metal tube and shaken until it settled. Jay walked with her duffel strap cutting into her shoulder and her boots ringing on the deck plates, and she kept her chin level because Reyes had told her to, and because the alternative was to look down at herself, and she had already done enough of that in the mirror that morning.

The station concourse opened around her in tiers — three levels of shops and berths and service windows stacked under a ceiling strung with cable trays and cold light. A repair drone the size of a cat tracked past her ankles, chirped, and veered off toward a bay marked HULL PATCHING, RATES BY THE HOUR. The air smelled of ozone, fried oil, and the wet-wool smell of a thousand people who had been breathing the same recycled atmosphere for too long.

She had two hours before the Kestrel's Weight docked at 1300. Two hours to be a civilian on a station that did not know her, did not want anything from her, and had no opinion about what she was.

It was the loneliest feeling she had felt in months.

She took the long way around the concourse, past the berth registry and the fuel brokers and the row of bars where crews waited out their layovers. She told herself she was scouting the docks. She was. She was also, if she was honest with herself — and she was trying to be, these days, in the small ways that were left to her — walking through the crowd to see what the crowd would do with her.

She had dressed for it. That was the part she would have denied a month ago. The skirt was short and floaty, a soft grey thing that moved when she moved and did not quite cover the tops of her thighs. The blouse was loose enough to hide the small breasts Cassiday had grown on her and thin enough to show them when the light hit right. The boots came to her knees. She had put on the red silk panties underneath — Reyes's panties, cleaned and folded in the leather case — and she had told herself it was because they were the only nice thing she owned.

It was not because they were the only nice thing she owned.

The first look came from a stevedore unloading crates near bay nine. He was a broad-shouldered man with a shaved head and a welding scar down one cheek, and he stopped with a crate balanced on his shoulder and watched her pass with the flat, unhurried assessment of a man pricing a piece of equipment.

Jay felt it land on the back of her neck like a hand.

She kept walking. Her pulse had picked up, and she knew exactly what that meant now — she had spent four months learning what it meant — and she did not try to talk herself out of it. The primer did not care whether she approved. The primer had simply taken the look and routed it somewhere warm, and the warmth was spreading low in her belly, and her cock was starting to fill against the silk of the panties.

By the time she reached the next bay, three more men had looked. A woman in a dockmaster's vest looked twice. A kid of maybe nineteen with grease on his forearms watched her legs the whole way past and then turned to watch them again from the other side.

Jay's face was hot. Her hands were steady. She had learned, somewhere between the Vixen and the Warspite, that those two things could be true at the same time.

She stopped at a service kiosk where a dockworker was leaning against a pillar with a tablet in one hand and a bulb of cold coffee in the other. He was older, maybe fifty, with grey stubble and a soft gut under his coveralls and the tired, comfortable look of a man who had been on this station long enough to stop being impressed by anything.

"Excuse me," Jay said. Her voice came out lower than she meant it to. She had never gotten used to the new register — not high, not breathy, just softer than the man's voice she had spent forty-two years hearing in her own throat. "I'm looking for the Kestrel's Weight. Freighter. Docking at thirteen hundred."

The dockworker looked up.

And then he looked down.

He did it slowly. That was the thing Jay would remember later — the slowness of it. He started at her face and worked his way down with the unhurried attention of a man reading a maintenance log he had all day to finish. Her throat. The loose collar of the blouse. The small rise of her chest under the thin fabric. The bare strip of thigh between the hem of the skirt and the top of her boots. The boots themselves, and the way they made her legs look longer than they were.

He took a drink of his coffee without looking away.

"Berth twenty-two," he said. "End of the row, past the fuel gantry. She's not in yet, but you can wait at the gate."

"Thanks."

"You crew?"

"Not yet."

"Huh." He looked at her legs one more time, deliberate, and then back up to her face with a small, knowing expression that Jay recognized the way you recognize a smell. "Well. Good luck with that."

Jay felt her cock twitch and thicken and push against the silk, and she felt the front of the skirt lift a fraction of an inch, and she knew — she knew — that he saw it, because his eyes dropped to her hemline and stayed there a beat too long and then came back up with something new in them.

She did not cover herself. She did not turn away. She stood there with her face burning and her cock tenting the front of a skirt in the middle of a public dockyard and let him look, because some part of her — the part that had been carved into her, the part Okafor had told her was hers and not a disease — wanted him to.

"Berth twenty-two," she said, as if nothing had happened.

"Berth twenty-two."

She walked away with her duffel on her shoulder and her cock hard against the wet silk of the panties and the warmth from the looks still pooled in her belly, and she did not let herself look back, and she did not let herself slow down.

The walk to berth twenty-two took her past the fuel gantry and the cargo marshaling yards and the long grey wall of the station's outer skin. The crowd thinned out. The lights got harsher. The air got colder, and the smell of ozone got stronger, and Jay pulled her blouse tighter across her chest and told herself it was for the cold.

By the time she reached the berth gate, her cock had gone soft again, and her face had cooled, and she had made a decision she had been circling for two hours.

She was going to tell the truth. All of it. Not the version that got her a berth. The actual version. Because she had spent four months being sold on versions of herself, and she was done with that, and because if the Kestrel's Weight was going to take her she wanted it to take the thing she actually was.

The gate was a chain-link frame with a magnetic seal and a reader pad, and beyond it the berth was empty — a long rectangle of dark decking with mooring clamps folded down like sleeping animals. Jay sat on a crate by the gate and waited, and the station hummed around her, and she watched the approach lights on the far wall blink their slow pattern and thought about nothing.

At 1254, the berth lights came up.

At 1256, the outer doors opened, and the Kestrel's Weight came in.

She was a working ship. That was the first thing Jay saw, and it settled something in her chest. No lines, no polish, no Star Service trim. Her hull was a patched and repatched expanse of grey plate with the scorch of a hundred atmosphere entries and the pitting of a dozen micrometeorite hits, and the name was stenciled along her flank in letters that had been touched up so many times they had gone soft at the edges. She was maybe a hundred and forty meters, a fat-bellied freighter with a blunt nose and a long cargo spine and a single dorsal fin that housed the comm array.

She smelled like rust and stale sweat and — Jay blinked, and then laughed out loud, alone on the crate — the sea. Salt. Someone had rigged a saltwater condenser somewhere and the whole berth smelled like a shore.

The clamps took her. The umbilical swung out. A hatch opened along the flank and a ramp extended, and a woman came down it with a tablet in her hand and a tool bag on her shoulder and the specific, harried walk of a chief engineer who had already found three things wrong.

Jay stood up.

The engineer saw her. Stopped. Looked her up and down with the same unhurried assessment the dockworker had used, but without the hunger — this was a different kind of looking, the looking of someone who was trying to figure out what a thing was for.

"You the one Reyes sent?"

"Yes."

"Djuna." She did not offer a hand. "Chief engineer. Captain's in the wardroom aft of the bridge. Follow me and don't touch anything."

Jay followed her up the ramp.

The Kestrel's Weight was a maze of cold steel containers and cable runs and the smell of oil and salt. Djuna walked fast and did not look back, and Jay kept her eyes on the deck plates and her duffel on her shoulder and did not touch anything. They passed a mess hall with a long table bolted to the deck and a galley with a kettle still steaming, and a crew berth with the door open and a man's voice inside it, and then a ladder up and a corridor that ran under the bridge and ended at a hatch marked WARDROOM.

Djuna knocked twice and opened it without waiting.

"Reyes's girl," she said, and stood aside.

The wardroom was small and warm and smelled like coffee and old paper. A table took up most of it, bolted to the deck, with a chart screen on one wall and a rack of mugs on another and a woman sitting at the head of the table with her boots up on a crate and a bulb of coffee in her hand.

Captain Halvorsen was maybe fifty-five, with short grey hair and a broad, weathered face and the kind of steady, unhurried eyes that had looked at a lot of things and been surprised by very few of them. She was not in uniform. She wore a heavy sweater with the elbows gone soft and a pair of work trousers and the same scuffed boots Djuna wore, and she looked at Jay the way a mechanic looked at a part that had been delivered without a manifest.

"Sit down," she said.

Jay sat.

Halvorsen took her boots off the crate and set her coffee down and folded her hands on the table, and for a long moment she just looked at Jay across the chart screen's pale glow. Jay made herself hold the look. She had learned to hold looks. It was one of the few things she had learned that she did not hate.

"Reyes says you're looking for a berth," Halvorsen said.

"Yes, ma'am."

"She says you're not looking for a mechanic's berth."

"No, ma'am."

"She says you're looking for a whore's berth."

The word sat on the table between them. Jay felt her face go hot and her hands stay steady, and she kept her eyes on Halvorsen's and said, "Yes, ma'am."

Halvorsen leaned back. She did not look disgusted. She did not look amused. She looked like a woman who had just been handed a form she had never seen before and was reading it line by line.

"Why?"

"Ma'am?"

"Why do you want to serve as a ship's whore?" Halvorsen picked up her coffee and drank and set it down. "I've had three people ask me for that berth in eleven years. One of them was a con artist. One of them was a kid who'd watched too many vids. One of them was a woman who wanted to die and thought a ship would do it for her. I want to know which one you are."

Jay looked at her hands. They were her hands — the same hands that had rebuilt a star-drive on the Venture's Star, the same hands that had held a wrench on the Vixen's maintenance deck, the same hands that had been strapped to a frame on Jones's ship. They had not changed. Nothing else had stayed the same.

"I'm none of them," she said. "Or — I'm the third one, maybe, but I got better."

"Go on."

"I was a mechanic for twenty years. I lost my job when the yards automated. I took a berth on a ship that turned out to be a slaverl, and I spent a month being used by the crew. Then I was sold to a station — a brothel ship — and I spent four months there being used by clients. Then I was captured by pirates and — " She stopped. Her throat had closed. She made herself breathe. "And modified. And then I was rescued. And I've spent the last six weeks in the Warspite learning what I am now."

Halvorsen did not interrupt. Her hands stayed folded on the table. Her eyes did not leave Jay's face.

"And what are you now?"

"A woman with a cock," Jay said. "And a — " She stopped again. Tried again. "The sickbay called it a synaptic primer. They rewired me. Permanently. It means — " She made herself say it. She had practiced saying it, in the dark of her cabin, out loud, to nobody. "It means the things that used to be shameful are the things that turn me on now. Being looked at. Being used. Being told what to do. That's not — that's not a wound they can fix. Doctor Pell said the body I have now is the body I keep."

Halvorsen nodded slowly. She did not say she was sorry. Jay was grateful for that.

"And you want to go back out," Halvorsen said. "To a ship. As a whore."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Why not a planet? Why not a job on the station? There's work here. Not your old work, but work."

Jay had thought about this. She had thought about it for six weeks, in the dark, on the bunk, with the journal Okafor had given her open on her knees and the pen in her hand. She had written it out and crossed it out and written it again.

"Because I'm a mechanic," she said. "I don't mean that as a joke. I mean — I know machines. I know what a crew is. I know what it feels like to be part of a thing that works. And I know — " She met Halvorsen's eyes. "I know what I'm good for now. And I want to be good for something. I want to be useful."

"Useful," Halvorsen said. "As a whore."

"As a whore."

Halvorsen looked at her for a long moment. Then she picked up her coffee and drank and set it down and said, "I've got eleven crew. Freighter. Long hauls. Six weeks out, two weeks in, six weeks out. We don't run a brothel, we don't carry passengers, and we don't sell anything but freight. So tell me — " She leaned forward. "What does the Kestrel's Weight get out of feeding another mouth?"

Jay had known this question was coming. She had written it out too, on a page she had then torn out and burned in the sickbay's disposal chute because she had been too ashamed to leave it where anyone could read it.

"Morale," she said. "Ma'am. That's the honest answer. A crew that's — " She stopped and tried to find the words that were not a sales pitch. "A crew that's got something to look forward to works harder. I've seen it. I've been on both sides of it. On the Venture's Star I was the thing the crew got to look forward to, and they worked harder because of it. On the Vixen I was the thing the clients got to look forward to, and the crew that ran that ship — " Her jaw tightened. "The crew that ran that ship was the most loyal crew I've ever seen. They'd have died for Madam Michelle. Not because she paid them. Because she gave them something."

"And you think you're that something."

"I think I can be."

Halvorsen was quiet. Then she said, "What do I get?"

Jay's face went hot again. She had known this question was coming too. She had not known how to answer it without sounding like she was offering something she did not have the right to offer.

"You get me," she said. "Ma'am. As the captain. You get — " She made herself say it. "You get to use my body as a personal sex slave. Whenever you want. However you want. Within the limits I'll tell you about in a minute. That's — that's the benefit to you. The crew gets the morale. You get me."

Halvorsen's eyes did not change. But her hands did — they unclasped, and her right hand came down flat on the table and stayed there, and Jay saw the pad of her thumb press white against the wood.

"How long since you were last used?"

The question was so direct that Jay almost answered it before she understood it.

"24 hours," she said. "Ma'am. My last — " She stopped. "My last was Captain Reyes. On the Warspite. Before I left."

"Reyes used you."

"Yes, ma'am. She — I asked her to. It was my idea."

Halvorsen nodded. "That's Reyes." She picked up her coffee and drank and set it down and looked at Jay with the same steady, unhurried eyes. "Tell me what you'll do."

"Ma'am?"

"The acts." Halvorsen's voice was flat. "You want to be used. Fine. Tell me what you'll do and tell me your limits. Both of them. In that order."

Jay's throat was dry. She looked at the rack of mugs on the wall and then at the chart screen and then at her hands, and then she made herself look at Halvorsen, and she said it.

"Orally," she said. "I'll take a cock in my mouth. Any size. Any throat depth you want me to learn. I'll swallow. I’ll rim arseholes. I'll — " She made herself keep going. "I'll take it in the ass. Anal. Any position. I'll bottom I’ll perform strip shows and public gangbangs. I'll serve as a urinal. I'll drink it. I'll — " Her voice was steady. She did not know how it was steady. "I'll be used by men and women. Humans and aliens. Any species. Any body. Any looks. I don't care what they look like. I care that they use me."

Halvorsen did not react except to set her coffee down with a small, deliberate click.

"Limits."

"Permanent damage. Permanent body modification. That's — that's the line. I've already been modified past what I would have chosen. I'm not going to sign up for more of it. No cutting. No surgery. No — " She touched her left hip without meaning to, where the horseshoe was inked into her ass cheek, and then took her hand away. "No new permanent marks that aren't tattoos. And — " She made herself say the last one clearly, because it was the one she would not compromise on. "Nothing involving children. Ever. Not as a participant, not as a witness, not as a — nothing. That's the hard line. I'd rather walk out that airlock and take my chances on the station."

Halvorsen looked at her for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, and Jay felt something in her chest loosen a quarter of an inch.

"Tattoos," Halvorsen said.

"Ma'am?"

"You said no new permanent marks that aren't tattoos. That means you'll allow tattoos."

"I — " Jay stopped. "Yes, ma'am. I'll allow tattoos."

"Any tattoo I want?"

"Within reason."

"Define reason."

"Not on my face. Not anything that would — " She stopped again. "Not anything that would make me a liability on a station. I need to be able to walk through a dockyard without being arrested."

"You can walk through a dockyard now," Halvorsen said. "I watched you do it." She picked up her coffee. "Do you have any already?"

Jay's face went hot. She looked at the table.

"Yes, ma'am."

"What are they?"

"Ma'am, I'd rather not — "

"I'm not asking to embarrass you," Halvorsen said. "I'm asking because I'm going to be the one who has to decide what to put on you next, and I need to know what's already there." She set her coffee down. "Show me."

Jay sat very still.

She had known, in some part of her, that it would come to this. That was why she had worn the skirt. That was why she had worn the panties. She had told herself it was for the dockyard, for the looks, for the warmth in her belly. It had not been for the dockyard.

She stood up.

Her hands went to the hem of her blouse. She was slow about it — not because she was hesitating, but because she was giving herself the time to hear herself do it. The wardroom was warm. The chart screen glowed. Halvorsen sat with her hands folded on the table and watched her without any expression at all, and Jay pulled the blouse up and over her head and set it on the crate beside her, and stood in the small warm room in her short grey skirt and her knee-high boots and the tiny thong, with her small breasts bare and her cock already starting to fill against the front of the skirt.

Halvorsen did not look at her chest. That was the thing Jay would remember later. Halvorsen looked at her face, and then at her hands, and then at the skirt, and then said, "The skirt."

Jay unzipped it.

She let it fall. The silk of the panties was wet at the front — she had been hard, off and on, since the dockworker, and the fabric had a darker patch where the head of her cock had pressed against it. She did not cover it. She turned, slowly, and put her hands on the edge of the table, and bent forward at the waist, and let Halvorsen see what was inked on her left ass cheek.

The horseshoe was old and dark and precise — a farrier's horseshoe, open side down, inked into the meat of her cheek by Cassiday's steady, liver-spotted hand. Below it, on the same cheek, was the second mark: the word WHORE in block capitals, six inches tall, inked so deep that the skin had scarred around the letters.

Jay held the position.

The wardroom was quiet. She could hear the ship's hull ticking as it cooled, and the low hum of the station outside, and the small sound of Halvorsen's coffee mug being set down on the table.

"Straighten up," Halvorsen said.

Jay straightened.

She turned, and she faced the captain, and she stood there in the red silk panties with her cock tenting the front of them and her small breasts bare and her face hot and her eyes level, and she did not cover herself, and she did not look away.

Halvorsen stood. She was shorter standing than Jay had expected — the boots on the crate had made her look taller — and she came around the table without hurry, and she stopped an arm's length away and looked at the tattoo the way Djuna had looked at the ship: not hungry, just thorough. Her eyes went from the horseshoe to the word and back again, and she did not flinch at either one, and that was somehow worse than a flinch would have been.

"Who did them?"

"The doctor on the pirate ship. Cassiday." Jay's voice came out flat. "He did the horseshoe the first night. Whore was done by the Madam on the brothel ship"

"Why that word."

"Because it's what I was."

Halvorsen's jaw moved. It took Jay a second to understand what she was watching — the captain was grinding her back teeth. "And why the horseshoe."

Jay did not answer.

"That's not a question I need the answer to," Halvorsen said, after the silence had gone on long enough to be its own kind of answer. "Turn around."

Jay turned. She heard Halvorsen move — a step, and then the sound of a drawer opening in the bolted cabinet along the wardroom wall. Something metal clicked against something else, and then the drawer slid shut, and then Halvorsen was back at the table and Jay was still standing with her back to her, her hands loose at her sides, the air in the wardroom moving cold against the bare skin of her back.

"You can face me."

She turned back. Halvorsen had a stylus in one hand and a flat grey datapad in the other, and she was already writing on it, thumb moving, the stylus scratching. She did not look up.

"Sit," she said. "You can put your blouse back on or not. I don't care either way. You'll want the skirt, though — the wardroom runs cold on the night watch."

Jay pulled the blouse back over her head and stepped into the skirt and zipped it, and sat. The silk of the panties was cool against her now, the wet patch going tacky, and she crossed her ankles under the table the way she had been taught — the way the Vixen had taught her, thighs together, hands folded, and she caught herself doing it and did not stop, because it was comfortable, and because Halvorsen had not asked her to stop.

Halvorsen wrote for a while. The stylus scratched. The hull ticked. Somewhere aft of the wardroom a pump kicked on and settled into a low, even rumble that Jay could feel through the soles of her boots, and she recognized it — a coolant circulation loop, starboard side, running a little rough on the bearing. She had heard a hundred of them. She almost said something about it. She did not.

"All right," Halvorsen said, and set the stylus down. "Here's what I'm going to tell you, and I want you to listen to the whole thing before you answer, because I've only got the patience to say it once."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You can have the berth."

Jay's breath caught. She had not expected it — not this fast, not this flat, not without a second interview or a trial run or a list of things she would have to prove. She had spent the walk to berth twenty-two rehearsing how she would take a no.

"Don't thank me yet," Halvorsen said. "You can have the berth on four conditions. One. You eat with the crew, you sleep in the crew berths, and you work a watch like everybody else although not quiet like anybody else. I don't carry passengers and I don't carry pets. If you're aboard, you're crew, and crew pull their weight."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Two. Nobody touches you without your yes. Not the crew, not a dockworker, not a passenger if we ever carry one, not me. You say no, it stops, and if it doesn't stop I want to hear about it before the shift ends. I don't care who it is. I don't care if it's my second mate. I don't care if it's somebody I've sailed with for nine years." She tapped the datapad. "I've written that down. It goes in the ship's log with your name on it. There's a line in my standing orders that says exactly that, and it's been there since before you were born, and it does not have an exception for you."

Jay looked at the datapad. "Ma'am — the sickbay said I'm conditioned. The primer. If I say no, that's — the no might not come out the way I mean it."

"Then we'll learn your tells," Halvorsen said, as if that were a problem with a known solution, and moved on. "Three. You will see Doctor Singh on this station before we undock. I have her on retainer. She does our crew physicals. You'll get a baseline exam, a contraceptive implant if you don't have one, and a blood panel, and she'll write me a note about anything I need to know about your —" she gestured at Jay with two fingers, "— condition. I read it. You read it. Nobody else does."

"I have a referral to her. From the doctor aboard the Warspite."

"Good. Then you'll use it before eighteen hundred." Halvorsen's thumb moved on the pad. "Four. Tattoos." She looked up. "I'm going to mark you. Not because I want to hurt you. Because the way this works on a working ship is that the crew needs to know, at a glance, what you are and what you're for, and a tattoo is the fastest way to say it without anybody having to ask. You said within reason. I'm going to hold you to that, and I'm going to hold myself to it, and the first one goes on before we leave the station so it's done by a licensed artist with a clean needle instead of whatever I've got in the med kit."

Jay's mouth was dry. "What's the first one."

"I haven't decided yet." Halvorsen said it without apology. "I'll decide tonight. You'll see it before it goes on. That's the deal — you don't get to veto the design, but you get to see it, and if it crosses one of your two hard limits you get to say so, and I'll hear you."

"And the second one?"

"There isn't a second one yet. There's four conditions and a tattoo, and that's the whole contract." Halvorsen set the datapad down and looked at her. "You're going to want to know what the pay is."

"I — yes, ma'am. I hadn't gotten that far."

"Crew share, same as everyone. It's not much. Freight margins are thin and the Kestrel's old. You'll eat, you'll have a rack, you'll have a share of the run bonus when we make schedule. If you want spending money you can take maintenance overtime like Djuna does." Halvorsen paused. "There's no separate rate for the other thing. I want that understood up front. You're not being paid for it. It's part of the berth. If you want to be paid for it, there's a station full of brothels out that hatch and I'll walk you to the best one myself."

"I don't want to be paid for it."

"I know you don't." Halvorsen's voice had something in it Jay couldn't read — not pity, not contempt, something closer to the flat acknowledgment of a woman who had seen this shape of wanting before and had learned not to argue with it. "That's why I asked."

She stood, went to the rack of mugs, and took one down — a heavy ceramic thing with a chip out of the rim — and filled it from the kettle on the sideboard. She set it in front of Jay. Tea, Jay realized, when the steam reached her: black, oversteeped, the way a ship's kettle made it.

"Drink that," Halvorsen said. "You've been standing at attention in my wardroom for twenty minutes with your hands not shaking and your voice not shaking and I've been watching you hold it together, and you can stop now. You're hired. You can put your hands around the mug and let them do what they want."

Jay wrapped her hands around the mug. They shook. Just a little, in the warmth, where Halvorsen could see it and where Jay could feel it, and she looked at the tea and did not say anything, and the shaking went on for a while and then stopped.

"I've got one more thing to say and then you're going to the berth deck," Halvorsen said, sitting back down. "Djuna met you at the ramp and Imani will feed you tonight and Bram will ask you a hundred questions about the Warspite because he's like that. There's a man named Okonkwo on this crew who will not look at you for a week, and that's not about you, that's about his sister, and you'll leave him alone about it. There's a woman named Sefa who will look at you too much and you'll have to decide what you want to do about that, and whatever you decide is fine as long as you tell her with your mouth and not with your face."

"Yes, ma'am."

“There are seven alien’s amoungst the crew, you will be expected to offer them the same as any other member of the crew. I can’t have a situation where someone gets something not availble to the others or vice versa. That would be bad for morale.”

Jay breiefly thought about her time aboard the Vixen and how she was used by aliens then. But this wasn’t the Vixen and the Captain had already said about getting a contraceptive implant. “Yes ma’am, I understand.” She replied meekly.

"And the last thing." Halvorsen leaned forward, and for the first time her voice dropped, and it was the only moment in the whole interview where Jay heard anything under the flatness. "You told me you'd rather walk out the airlock than break your line about children. I believe you. Which means you already know what your line is worth, and that means you're not going to sit there and tell me you've got no lines at all. So here's mine. If somebody on this crew asks you for something and you say yes because you want to, fine. If you say yes because you're afraid of what happens if you say no, that's not sex, that's a problem, and it comes to me. You understand me?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Then finish your tea."

Jay finished her tea. It was bitter and too hot and the best thing she had tasted in six weeks, and she drank all of it while Halvorsen wrote on the datapad, and when the mug was empty she set it down and stood, and Halvorsen stood with her and walked her to the wardroom hatch and opened it onto the corridor.

"Berth deck's one down and three forward. Imani's got the duty and she'll show you your berth. Take the end berth, it has no door, no privacy, but as the ships free use whore you shouldn’t expect any — it's cold at night but frankly I doubt that you will have any trouble keeping warm." Halvorsen hesitated, one hand on the hatch frame, and then said, flatly, "One more thing, and then I'm done. You're going to see me in the corridor tomorrow and you're going to wonder whether I've decided yet. I have. You'll know when you know."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Go."

Jay went. The corridor was colder than the wardroom and narrower than the Warspite's and smelled of grease and salt, and she found the ladder down with her duffel on her shoulder and her boots ringing on the rungs, and at the bottom she turned forward and there was Imani coming out of the mess with a tray, and Imani saw her and stopped and smiled and said, "You got it, then," and Jay said, "I got it," and Imani said, "Good. You're on my watch. Dinner's at nineteen, and it's Okonkwo's night, so it'll be edible."

Jay walked past her to the berth deck and found the end berth, it was small. Just a single room, a bed, small coffe table and chair and off to the left shower and toilet cubicles. She put her duffel down on the mattress and sat on the edge of it with her hands on her knees, and the coolant loop rumbled under the deck plates, and somewhere above her the ship's hull ticked as it cooled, and she was crew.

She sat there for a while. She thought about the tattoo Halvorsen had not decided on yet, and about the fact that she had said yes to it in a warm wardroom with a mug of tea in front of her, and about the fact that she would have said yes to it in a cold room with nothing in front of her, and about the difference between those two things and how much of it mattered. She thought about the dockworker's eyes and the warmth that had pooled in her belly and the fact that she had worn the thong on purpose. She thought about the fact that she was, at this moment, sitting on a rack on a freighter she had been hired onto an hour ago, and that the hiring had gone exactly the way she had wanted it to go, and that she had told the truth the whole time.

She unzipped the duffel and took out the leather case and opened it and looked at the red silk panties folded inside, the ones that brought back the memory of the taste of Reyes’ pussy and arse. The ones Reyes had given to her cleaned and folded because Reyes had wanted her to have something nice to remember her by and had not wanted to say so, and she closed the case and put it back and zipped the duffel and set it on the deck under the rack.