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“It hasn’t anything to do with you or me here and now. Seems to me our first job is to find a new berth somewhere. New name—at least for me.” Snake’s hiss . . . He winced. “I don’t even know where to start.”
    “And give them up as dead?” Jeje muttered in that low growl. “You heard what that first mate said. They could be alive. Alive, and forced to act as pirates.”
    Shock, relief, now anger. “He’s a lieutenant. In navies they have ranks.” Testhy twisted his lips. “You’re still trotting behind Taumad’s shadow?”
    Resentment made Jeje hot. She struggled against a nasty retort. “No. I’m not. It was Inda I was thinking of. And Tau, too. Mates—they are our mates, all of them. Kodl, who’s been a good first mate since we were all rats on the Pim ships—he looked out for us, always. Dasta who never wears a jacket. Dun the carpenter, too, even though he didn’t talk much. And the new crew—Rig making us those cinnamon rolls as long as we don’t expect him to ever be a baker for real. Thog, always quiet. Ready to work. Wumma and his carvings. Don’t you feel like they’re a-a—” She groped, fingers poking the air. Family wasn’t the word. She had that at home. Lovers wasn’t right either, though she’d had only one tumble with dear Yan, but that memory would stay secret and precious.
    Testhy actually met her eyes for a moment, but in the way his eyelids lowered and his shoulders hitched up, Jeje understood that he didn’t believe her about their being mates. Again she felt resentment flare, hotter than fire and as destructive, but she could see in his face, in his hunched posture that he expected to be attacked, and her anger cooled enough for her to say, “You don’t need to know what happened to them?”
    Testhy dug his fingernail into the rough board of the table. Jeje’s straight black brows were quirked, furrowing her high brow—she looked hurt. She was probably the most popular of the entire band outside of Inda, yet she hadn’t the least idea of it. Testhy had thought a lot about the strange phenomenon of popularity because he wasn’t. People hardly noticed him; it had always been that way.
    He shook his head once. “I think I know,” he said to the table, so softly she almost couldn’t hear him.
    “But we don’t. And I have to find out.”
    “Why? What can you do if you do find out they are alive?”
    “I can try to—oh, I know it sounds stupid. Like some strut-rump trying to be a hero from a ballad, and maybe I’ll end up sunk, or dead, or laughed off the docks. But I know I have to find out. And do something. It’s because I know Inda would do it for me, if he’d been on the Vixen .”
    Testhy’s brows rose. Then he shook his head. “Maybe for you. You all were mates. Like you said.”
    “You were, too,” she retorted, and when she saw his lips twitch in denial, she said, “you could have been.” But as she said it she realized he couldn’t have, for whatever reason. She knew his likes and dislikes in food, because you can’t share a wardroom without discovering that, but where he went on liberty she had no idea. She’d never thought about it before—hadn’t been interested enough to ask.
    So she was trying to make him a mate now because she needed one, not because she wanted him as a mate. Regret, sharp and fierce, seized her. Everything had changed, and not because of the pirate attack. Things had changed inside her head.
    She said slowly, “Inda would go after you.”
    Testhy grimaced, then shunted one shoulder up under his ear, a sharp movement. “Maybe. But he’s better at fighting. If he lives, he might survive. I wouldn’t, not against pirates out at sea, not against the lawful authorities here. Your name isn’t on that list! Makes sense to find a new berth. Get on with my life.”
    “No, my name isn’t. I guess your way makes sense. But I don’t think it’s right.” As she spoke, she groped mentally toward a new discovery.