Lingle could occasionally hear a confused or alarmed patient shouting on a different deck. Less often, a cluster of inmates whispering or mutually grooming each other spontaneously erupted, one inmate reasserting the pack order, the others shrieking and scattered into their own corners. But the Stiles was unusually peaceful tonight.

In the next berth, the prison hulk Mothernaked rose and fell. The two ships were close enough that Stiles' patients could trade with the prisoners across the gap. No one knew now whether the Stiles or Mothernaked had been docked here first, or when. They had always been here.

On moonless nights like this, Lingle sometimes felt his way down to the Stiles' bilge, and stood in the waist-deep water in the total darkness. There, if he tapped out a prime number on the ship's hull, something under the hull would pound out the next prime in sequence. What the hell? Could a porpoise do that? No, he knew it was the Stiles. Stiles eavesdropped, too. If you whispered a secret in the darkness in the bilge, Stiles would echo someone else's secret back to you. He knew Stiles had the goods, because his own secrets had come back to him from the other patients.

But tonight he was just below the main deck, squinting through a barred window that had been a cannon well in time before memory. A ship's silhouette had just come around the bend in the river, and he strained to see. It was lolling and seemed derelict. As it drifted toward Stiles and Mothernaked, it turned around a few times in the water, and rolled until the main mast almost touched the water's surface before gradually recovering.

A few distant lanterns appeared on the far shore and meandered on a quay, the bearers indecisively watching. The ship eventually came downriver and drifted near to Mothernaked. Lingle could see that it was the Herndon and that human outlines slumped in the bow. It smelled like Hilde. How could that wreck have come all the way from Hilde?

The Mothernaked and the derelict's bows almost kissed now. Were they going to touch? No: instead a staggering explosion shredded the two bows. Where they had been, there was just a gaping hole, a view of the opposite shore lit up for an instant by the flash. A second after the explosion, Mothernaked's remaining half was already enveloped in flame and thick black smoke, turned on end, going under. The smell of Hilde saturated everything.

The blast had thrown Lingle into the opposite wall. He couldn't hear and his eyes watered, but he could see that Stiles was burning, too. Inmates were running everywhere like ants whose nest has been kicked over, their faces drawn and clearly screaming. It was the same unwatchable rout that happens when a line breaks and panics, turning their backs to their attackers, or when a troll stumbles onto a sleeping army encampment.

Over the years, sewer methane explosions in the city had broken open sections of the street and brought nearby survivors scurrying. But the city had never seen anything like this. It would bring out a swarm of scared lantern-bearers to this side of the shore, but no help would come to the Stiles. It was no one's responsibility. Lingle pulled up his legs, wrapped his arms around them, and waited for the end.

Near the opposite shore, Clovis quietly rowed one of Herndon's lifeboats to the lanterns on the quay. Rowing had a refreshing, quaint charm that just willing a boat to move didn't have. He gathered up his little knapsacks while a preoccupied lantern-bearer tied off the boat. He clambered onto the shore.

Clovis had arrived in Hollin.