The door opened without warning.

  No knock. No voice before it. Just the lock disengaging and light arriving and a man filling the doorway with the energy of someone who had somewhere to be and had added this to the list without enthusiasm.

  He was broad. Not tall but built like someone who had spent years doing work that required it. A jaw that looked like it had opinions about everything and kept most of them to itself. He looked at Aren the way you look at a task you've been assigned and have no strong feelings about either way.

  "Up," he said.

  Aren got up.

  His body registered its complaints in order of severity. He ignored them in the same order and followed the man up the narrow stairs and onto the deck.

  The morning hit him differently than the night had.

  Grey light. The kind that comes before the sun has fully committed to the day. The water around the ship was darker than it had looked by moonlight, heavier, moving in slow rolls that had nothing hurried in them. The mist sat at the horizon — further now, the ship having put distance between itself and the gods domain through the night.

  The man pointed.

  Stern end of the deck. A bucket already waiting. A brush beside it.

  Aren looked at where he was pointing.

  Then he looked away.

  Then he looked back because looking away didn't change anything.

  The blood had dried overnight.

  That was the first thing his mind registered and immediately wished it hadn't. Dark and wide and uneven at its edges the way blood gets when it moves before it stops, when whatever made it stop moving had already happened. It covered more of the deck than he'd expected. More than one person could reasonably contain.

  His stomach moved.

  He breathed through his nose.

  He could feel eyes on him. Not many — the crew had their own work, their own morning routines that didn't include watching the stranger from the brig. But some of them were watching. He could feel it the way you feel a room's attention without looking directly at it.

  He picked up the bucket.

  He walked to the stern.

  He started cleaning.

  He focused on the brush. On the grain of the wood beneath it. On the motion — back and forth, practical, forward moving. He did not think about what he was cleaning. He breathed carefully and kept the brush moving and looked only at the section of deck immediately in front of him.

  He was doing well.

  Then he saw the pocket watch.

  Half buried in the blood. The chain catching the grey morning light. The cover engraved with something worn smooth by years of handling — the kind of wear that only comes from a hand reaching for something every single day without thinking about it.

  Something that had been carried until the day it couldn't be anymore.

  His stomach lurched hard.

  He stopped moving the brush.

  Breathed.

  In through the nose.

  Out through the mouth.

  The watching eyes were still there. He could feel them. He straightened his face into something neutral and kept the brush moving and after a moment the attention drifted elsewhere and he was alone with the bucket and the brush and the pocket watch sitting in what remained of whoever had carried it.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  He cleaned around the watch.

  He didn't touch it.

  He didn't know why. It just felt like the one thing he couldn't bring himself to move.

  When he was almost finished — the wood coming back to something closer to what it had been, the bucket a color he wasn't going to think about — he straightened and looked out at the water.

  The mist sat at the horizon.

  White. Patient. Saying nothing.

  He looked at it for a moment.

  Then looked away.

  It was while he was finishing that he noticed the ruin.

  Not dramatically. It arrived the way obvious things arrive when you've been too occupied to see them.

  He glanced up.

  It was there. Cycling its notification above him with the patience of something that didn't understand urgency.

  "This User Is Dead!"

  He reached for it carefully, the way you reach for something you're not certain will hold.

  It responded.

  The interface clarified — not just the notification but something beneath it, layered, structured in a way he hadn't seen before. He moved through it slowly, the way you move through something you don't want to break, until something stopped him.

  Two words he didn't fully understand yet.

  Memory Visualisation.

  He looked at it.

  Tapped it.

  Nothing happened.

  Or — something happened, but not in a way he could immediately parse. A sensation, faint, like static at the edge of his perception. He looked around trying to identify what had changed and couldn't find it.

  He frowned.

  Crouched down without fully deciding to and pressed his palm against the deck.

  And then—

  A shipyard.

  Not a vision exactly. More like being inside a memory that wasn't his — standing in the middle of the ship being built, the wood new and pale and smelling of sap, hands he didn't recognize moving around him fitting planks with the careful attention of people who understood what the ocean did to poor workmanship. Sound came with it. Sawing. Voices. The particular knock of a mallet against a joint being set.

  Then it was gone.

  He was on the deck.

  His palm still flat against the wood.

  He stayed crouched.

  His mind was doing something careful and slow, the way it does when it's encountered something it doesn't have a category for yet and is trying to build one from scratch.

  'What was that,' he thought.

  He pressed his palm down again.

  The shipyard came back. Different angle this time — he was watching a section of hull being fitted, the same hands, the same light. He pulled his palm up. The deck returned. He pressed down again. Shipyard. Up. Deck.

  He sat back on his heels.

  'The ship,' he thought slowly. 'I'm seeing the ship. Where it's been. What it's been through. Its—'

  He stopped.

  Looked at his palm.

  'Its memory.'

  He pressed his hand against the deck one more time, slower now, deliberate, and let the shipyard settle around him and watched it with different eyes — not startled, not confused, just watching. A man arguing with another man about the angle of a particular beam. Someone laughing at something he couldn't hear. The ship being real and new and not yet whatever it had become.

  He pulled his hand back.

  Stood up slowly.

  The ruin cycled above him.

  He looked at it differently now.

  Then he looked at his shirt.

  At the blood on it. Dried and dark and long past the point of being cleaned. He'd been avoiding looking at it directly since he woke up on the boat. Treating it as a fact he'd acknowledged and set aside.

  'If I touch it,' he thought. 'If I touch it and activate it—'

  He would see whoever this body belonged to.

  He would see what happened to him.

  He needed to know.

  He was afraid to know.

  He filed the fear where he filed things that weren't useful and stood on the deck and looked at the shirt and did not touch it yet because here was not the place and now was not the time.

  Later.

  When he was alone.

  The broad man came back when the deck was done.

  He looked at the stern. Looked at Aren. Said nothing about either.

  "Come," he said.

  Aren followed him below.

  They stopped at a small room he hadn't seen before. Not the brig — slightly larger, with a low table and a bench bolted to the wall. The man set something down without ceremony.

  Hard bread. A piece of dried meat. A cup of water that smelled like the ship.

  "Eat," he said.

  Then he left.

  Aren sat down.

  He looked at the food.

  In another life he would have had opinions about it. Detailed ones, probably sent to Dami in a series of increasingly dramatic messages at two in the morning.

  He picked up the bread.

  It was exactly as hard as it looked.

  He ate it anyway because his body had stopped caring about opinions and moved on to requirements. The dried meat was saltier than anything he'd voluntarily consumed before. The water tasted like rope and long distances.

  He finished all of it.

  The brig again after.

  The door closed. The lock engaged.

  Dark.

  He sat against the wall and let his eyes adjust to nothing and thought about the shirt.

  He'd been thinking about it since the deck. The memory visualisation — he was still turning the word over, still not entirely certain he understood what it was or where its limits were — had shown him the ship being built. The same function applied to the shirt would show him something else entirely.

  The man whose face he wore in the reflection.

  Where he'd been.

  What had happened to him.

  He needed to know and he was afraid to know and the fear was more honest than the need but it wasn't going to help him, so he pressed his palm flat against the fabric of his shirt and opened the ruin and reached—

  The brig disappeared.