Farah made sure she was on top of the envelope the next day as the Odonus's final coordinates approached. The mood on the ship was unbearably tense—just being down within range of the other crewmates threatened to suffocate her entirely. Up here was also a better place to watch for danger. Farah crouched near the exit hatch and rocked on the balls of her feet as she watched the sky, looking for nothing in particular, but anything out of place.

The sky remained clear. Recalling the Nectamia's warning, Farah turned a sharp eye on the fish instead. She half expected them to abandon the waterdrops and swarm past like they had in the rumors, but none did. If anything, there were fewer than usual, not more. Fewer fish could mean a ship had passed by recently. The longer Farah looked, though, the less she trusted her own assessment. The watchman had not noted anything. She was being paranoid, and paranoia meant a different kind of danger: the danger of clouding her own judgment with futile worrying, and missing a genuine threat. She returned her attention to the sky again

The Odonus's last coordinates passed around midday. Farah felt the visceral relief of the watchwoman when the news came, delivered by a shaky and exhausted Gemi. She must have been in the radio room since the crack of dawn.

The haze that had hung over the sky in the morning dissipated with the passage of the sun, leaving the Tideless bright and clean and shining. Fish flashed their sides as the Ariomma approached. An hour past the coordinates, something glistened in one of the waterdrops. Farah shielded her eyes and peered harder. She caught her breath. The entire column was filled with jellyfish, all pearly white frills, iridescent bells, and heartbeat pulsing. There were so many, they didn't all fit. Every few seconds, one would get shunted out by its mindless companions, and flail through the air before it found its way back to the same waterdrop, or over to the next one.

The watchwoman glowered. Sea-vermin and bad luck stood out amidst a swirling soup of superstition when Farah peeked into her thoughts. This woman spotted—or claimed to spot—more omens out here than the rest of the crew combined, and wasted no time in informing her crewmates about them. If she had her way, no sailor would toss their wash-water overboard while the winds blew sun-clockwise, look over their shoulder after a sea-turtle, or curse in the presence of a black tern. Some of these were heeded more closely than others, usually to the degree that they were shared.

Jellyfish, apparently, were signs of ill waters, poor fish catches, or both, depending on where they appeared. Farah watched their ghost-opal sheen fade into the distance as the Ariomma retreated. She did not share sailors' superstitions. In that moment, though, she could feel what drew people to believe them: it was reassuring to feel you could read the Tideless, which so often defied all prediction. The watchwoman turned away, appeasing her own anxieties. Ill waters and poor catches could not sink an airship. 

Three days past the coordinates, the Ariomma's navigator declared the ship to have left the zone through which the Odonus could have drifted had it lost its engines. Kaz chattered Farah's ear off about what he was learning in the engine pods as his nervous energy wore off. In another two days, he and the rest of the crew had relaxed.

Farah never did. Gemi picked up a radio broadcast from the Nectamia again that day, as it turned around somewhere within half a day's distance and headed back the way they'd just come. It had lost contact with another rescue vessel, and was trying to locate it again. The Odonus still hadn't been found.

Farah was already awake the next morning when a shot of alarm radiated in from the side of the Ariomma. Jhaṛa had spotted something. This was confirmed moments later by the watchman, who practically slid down the ladder from the top of the envelope. A ship had been spotted on the starboard horizon. It wasn't moving, and it wasn't the Nectamia. Farah bolted out of bed. No one paid her any mind as she slipped between scrambling sailors and scampered up the ladder to the ship's topside. She had no part in sailing the Ariomma; only maintaining its largest constituent part. The watchman was back at his post. Farah fastened her safety line and moved to his side of the ship to see what he and Jhaṛa had.

Hanging on the world-radial horizon was another airship. It floated with its nose pointed off from the area's flight paths, listless and idle, and its its tail-fins made no attempt to correct its course. It was adrift. The Ariomma's engines slowed. Jhaṛa must be planning to approach at a crawl, attempting to make contact.

The Ariomma's watchman paced the top of the envelope. Several waterdrops still rose between the Ariomma and the mystery ship. The name and patterns on its envelope would be visible through the watchman's spyglass when those passed, allowing identification. Farah waited silently. She was the first to know when the watchman gasped, the chill up his spine tangible even through his thoughts.

It wasn't the Odonus.

It was the rescue vessel the Nectamia had been trying to find.

Farah gripped the ship's guide-rails. Adrenaline pricked her skin like fire as she ran an inventory of her weapons and escape routes semi-consciously; the watchman would be targeted first if anything attacked, the nearest hatch was a stone's throw away, and she had of course not left the crew's quarters without her knife. Only closing the distance to the ship would tell them what had marooned it. There were no storms in the Tideless, but plenty of piracy. Even search and rescue vessels from the Colony carried guns and ammunition. This one would have been a desirable target, if not an easy one.

The question, then, was whether the pirates were still around, or whether the ship had been scuttled and left to drift. Farah scanned the sky and surrounding clouds restlessly. Where would a pirate ship hide? It would be camouflaged, but against the water or the clouds?

The Ariomma turned. Now it circled the ship—the Verulux—in a slower approach. If this was a trap, it had yet to spring. Farah squinted against the sun as the Verulux loomed ahead. Its hexagonal patterning marked it as a sister ship to the Nectamia, just as the Ariomma's stripe did with the outer city. Farah searched it for signs of life. Another chill raised the baby hairs on the back of her neck. Half the Verulux's gondola windows were shattered. Its control room was in disarray, and a torn map dangled outside the navigation room, caught on broken glass. There was only a hole where the gangway should be.

Farah turned her attention to the envelope. Its fabric skin was riddled with holes that concentrated towards the top of it, as if it had been shot at from above. Had it been ambushed? Few pirates had access to this much ammunition. The same thought crossed the watchman's thoughts moments later, then Baskoro's. He and Jhaṛa were on the axial catwalk, back in Farah's telepathic range. She tuned into their thoughts instead. There was an option other than pirates. If another city wanted to instigate conflict with the Colony, targeting one of their prized vessels was the way to do it.

We need to investigate.

Baskoro again. Jhaṛa's thoughts were on a different track: there was a reward for returning this ship. Farah returned to the watchman. He had his spyglass still trained on the Verulux, like he'd seen something she hadn't. And at last, the ship's other side came into view.

The Verulux's envelope had been opened top to bottom by four monumental gashes. Metal glinted where the ship's skeleton peeked through the wounds over half-deflated gasbags, each sunken after several days' leakage. There was no pattern to the damage. If there was, Farah would have assumed it was the work of some giant, clawed creature, but no two tears ran parallel to one another.

Get the thistle.

Farah froze. It was Jhaṛa, dealing orders to Baskoro beside her. She imagined snagging the ship with a grappling hook, towing it to the Colony, collecting an even greater reward than she would for the Odonus. She named two more crew members. One was a competent scout and the other, a fighter, leaving Farah with little doubt what her next task would be. They were boarding the Verulux to investigate.