The steel bars are not even wide enough to shove his hands through. After a week’s starvation, maybe. He’ll wither and die, but what does a man in his position deserve?

A thousand shrieking calls. Two hundred men per gondola. All gone. Most gone. The distinction is meaningless. More than one is the same as two hundred. Torus Orgonek only wishes that he died first so he didn’t have to see the others careen off their gondolas like pinwheeling dolls. Things should improve, but they won’t. They never will.

Sometimes, it comes in violet bursts. Sometimes, it hits you all at once. Sometimes, the wave is too large to take; in others, it is subtle and creeping. Whatever will hit Torus will come from a thousand directions and never cease.

The hold is in the center of Dalgesh’s concentration of the Far Flung. Positioned between every barracks, it’s underground, so they don’t have to waste vesicle gas on the prisoners, but the top is glass and beneath the promenade where all men walk. From there, they look down on Orgonek. Friends of the fallen. Comrades. Crewmen, no, because all of them are in cells.

The cell is high security, but the walls are stone. If he wanted, he could ram his head against it until it breaks. He just might.

He’s alone in the cell save for a black hardshell case in one corner. It leans there just as lost as he is, just as purposeless. He clicks it open and finds an old friend.

Gertrude has been there since the beginning, since Lucius and he left Kaskit for the Abscess and learned to make their home among the flesh. Smuggling supplies wasn’t unheard of—still isn’t—but something as large as a musket making the dangle here that is not, without sparking outrage, is unheard of. Favors had to be called. Gertrude was worth it.

There is a monochrome cast to everything, even the banjo in front of him. Its mahogany fretboard is gray; its ivory body is gray, and the silver accents, too. The colors are a memory now, once the only of their kind existing aside from the gondola, a contrast to the endless red of the Abscess. Now, the brightness bleeds out of everything.

Resting at the banjo’s side is Lucius's harmonica. Naming objects, even ships, was beyond Lucius. He never deemed it anything. That tendency always made Torus laugh. Now, it sags his back down to the pockets of the Hells.

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Grief delays, but sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes, grief screams at you until you’re deaf—unless you give it a channel to escape. Such is the only channel Torus has the will left to carve.

He plucks Gertrude’s strings with his right hand, hammers on with his left, and leads the tune with a pulsating baseline. He adds percussion by smacking his thumbs on the body and tapping his feet to a metronome’s precision. Parking that rhythm in the back of his mind, Torus then employs most of his left-hand fingers to add the melody, the closest approximation to Lucius’s harmonica accompaniment. His brother’s instrument rests on the cell’s floor, and Torus imagines the wind seeping out from it, producing the lead.

Off-kilter, ill-timed, and hard to stomach. It sounds like three different instruments arguing for the spotlight. It’s not a jig or something that fades into the background that allows for lyrics, either. It dominates the center stage, every stage to Torus, and he loses himself in it, imagining his brother bending his harmonica to match the waning pitch. He plays until his right hand bleeds, and it’s evident that the Flung let him take the instrument in the cell because the strings are as good as a garrote, and he could choke to death by swallowing any of the nuts holding those strings to the bed. A dozen other ways to die appear to him in snapped images, in repetitions that dance to the tune.

With the melody still ringing, the bass line hammering like heavy wood, Torus pulls himself off the floor just as someone approaches the cell door. A prison guard, with Romig in front of him. The lead cannoneer dips his head, keeping his mouth shut, though he’s got a bit of the Ox and Ape and a dozen other strands he could leverage to overpower the man. He doesn’t. If the Flung wants to rip him apart, let them.

“Don’t ask me why,” says the guard, a man Torus has never seen but probably knows of him. Everyone knows the Saint, though this time, he wishes no one did. The guard pulls a key and works the mechanism. A hydraulic pump squeaks, and the door slides open.

He stands there, towering over Romig and Torus, too. Torus is a man curled up and much less of anything anymore, a discarded piece of trash in an otherwise working machine. All he can do is clog the gears, loose the ropes from the pulleys, and set the whole thing tumbling down. The sooner Torus, Romig, and the rest of the mutineers are burned, the better.

The guard closes the door behind Torus once he’s outside. “It’s Cackles,” he mutters. “You know the way.”

Impartial and neutral, his posture implies, but his tone holds all the assurance that if Cackles does not order Torus’s death, someone will stab him in the back and finish it. A hundred men are probably lining up outside the hold, waiting for the opportunity. He wonders if he’ll have a chance to see the Chittens again before he goes.

Orgonek keeps his head down, Romig by his side, preparing for the dressing down of the century.