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turned out that lockers could be rented only by the week, which meant I had to spend a lot more than I'd expected. Then it turned out that mattresses and blankets were offered a la carte and had to be paid for separately. Oh, and so was the lock. If I stayed there for more than six weeks it would cost more to rent the mattress and blanket than it would have to buy them, but surely by then.…
    The locker was exactly long enough for the mattress, with half a meter of clearance overhead. It felt a little like crawling into my own coffin, an image I tried desperately to push out of my head. Elaine showed me how to lock it from the inside. It was pitch black, and I realized that the only light source I had with me was my gadget. I turned it on, trying to glean some reassurance from the dim glow. But the "battery low" light was lit, and I didn't have the charging cable. I turned it off and tried to settle in.
    The mattress was so hard I wasn't sure why I'd bothered to rent it, and the blanket was thin. I had no pajamas or even a toothbrush, and I'd forgotten to get a pillow.
    When I focused, though, I could feel the movement of the waves: the gentle up-and-down rocking that had been part of my life since I was four years old. That, at least, was the same down here as it was in my father's apartment. I closed my eyes and focused on the waves until I fell asleep.
     
    I woke up desperately wanting to pee. It took me a second to remember how to work the lock, and I mis-remembered the distance to the floor and stumbled. Three women were standing around talking, but they fell instantly silent and stared at me, wide-eyed.
    "Elaine helped me rent this locker last night," I said. "My father kicked me out. And I have to pee. Can you tell me where the bathroom is?"
    It was down the hall, but you needed to swipe an ID card to get in. "I'll swipe you in," one of the women said grudgingly, "but you'll owe me the charge."
    "…it costs money?"
    There was a round of derisive laughter. "You sound like a foob," one of them said. "Fresh on the boat. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, honey, and there's water in those bathrooms. Desalinated water. You don't think that's free, do you?"
    Of course. In our apartment, the water was simply billed to my father. "I have an ID card," I said, hesitantly, "but I'm not sure it'll work. And I don't want my father to know where I am."
    "You can get a cash-basis card if you want to stay anonymous," the woman said. "They cost more, though." She swiped her card and let me into the bathroom. "Don't waste water," she called after me. "It's all getting billed to me."
    I peed. The toilet would be saltwater, so at least I wouldn't be charged as much, but it flushed itself twice while I was sitting on it. I'd run into toilets before that did this and it had startled me, but never infuriated me. When I was done, I rinsed my mouth, since I had no toothbrush. I carried a hairbrush in my backpack, and I wet it to brush my hair and then put my hair in a ponytail. I would have liked a shower, but I had no towel, plus I didn't want to abuse the woman's generosity.
    "The stupid toilet flushed itself three times," I said when I came out. "But I used less than a gallon from the sink. Can I pay you later today? I need to get money from Geneva."
    "Yeah," she said, and told me how much I owed her.
    Now that I'd peed, I realized how hungry I was. The last time I'd eaten was on Amsterdarn, yesterday, with Thor and Janice. Clark's was the dining room on this level: it was cheap and offered meal plans by the week. The line was really long, probably due to the slowdown the union had organized. I was standing in it when I remembered that this was the dining hall that had poisoned Debbie's sister Lynn. What if they poisoned me? What if my father had paid them to poison me? What if the whole purpose of throwing me out was to set me up to get so sick that they could blackmail me with medical care?
    I went to the sandwich shop near my