It occurred to me that I might never walk again … or see my family, or watch seabirds swoop over the dross ships, anchored beneath Wuphon’s domelike shelter trees.

I tried talking to the insecty giants trooping in and out of my cell. Though each had a torso longer than my dad is tall — with a flared back end, and a tubelike shell as hard as Buyur steel — I couldn’t help picturing them as enormous phuvnthus, those six-legged vermin that gnaw the walls of wooden houses, giving off a sweet-tangy stench.

These things smell like overworked machinery. Despite my efforts in a dozen Earthling and Galactic languages, they seemed even less talkative than the phuvnthus Huck and I used to catch when we were little, and train to perform in a miniature circus.

I missed Huck during that dark time. I missed her quick g’Kek mind and sarcastic wit. I even missed the way she’d snag my leg fur in her wheels to get my attention, if I stared too long at the horizon in a hoonish sailor’s trance. I last glimpsed those wheels spinning uselessly in the sea dragon’s mouth, just after those giant jaws smashed our precious Dream and we spilled across the slivers of our amateur diving craft.

Why didn’t I rush to my friend, during those bleak moments after we crashed? Much as I yearned to, it was hard to see or hear much while a screaming wind shoved its way into the chamber, pushing out the bitter sea. At first, I had to fight just to breathe again. Then, when I tried to move, my back would not respond.

In those blurry instants, I also recall catching sight of Ur-ronn, whipping her long neck about and screaming as she thrashed all four legs and both slim arms, horrified at being drenched in vile water. Ur-ronn bled where her suede-colored hide was pierced by jagged shards — remnants of the glass porthole she had proudly forged in the volcano workshops of Uriel the Smith.