She had looked at the ocean from her window for twenty-three years, that faint grey line on the horizon that she had never particularly examined why she watched. She had formed some picture of what it would mean to be on the water rather than beside it, the crossing, the smell, the quality of being somewhere that moved. The ship was nothing like that picture. Every detail of it had been wrong.
The smell hit her first, before she even boarded, standing on the southern dock in the pre-dawn grey with her wrists unbound and nowhere to run. Meeka's trunks were being carried up the gangplank and down into the hull with the rest of the cargo. Salt and tar and something deeper underneath, something organic and cold and permanent, the smell of a world that did not care whether you found it hospita
