“I’m sorry, what was that?”

She’s between shifts, tired now, floating weightless at the center of the ship, warming herself around a bulb of throat-shreddingly flavorless ethyl, letting the kinks work themselves loose in the long muscles of her back. Savoring the receding soreness.

“Five hundred days, I said. Do the third row before the second tomorrow, that’s all.” The balear making the pitch isn’t one she knows, but she recognizes the babyface of a habitual sailor, the loose-limbed confidence of a woman who’s spent her life off the islands.

“Why?”

“Doesn’t matter to you. Hell, doesn’t matter to me. Who knows? Somebody wants it in that order, that’s all. Five hundred days. No harm done, hey? What does it matter, an hour or two either way?”

She revolves it this way and that but can’t find the hook. “Deal,” Petra says, and the balear buys them both a drink to seal it. She’s got a good smile, that one, and the long hands of a pianist or rifler. Petra buys the next round, and they take them back to her nest in the rigging to drink them. There’s no privacy, but the baleares are tactful; it’ll do.