Danielle doesn't want to wake. Dimly aware that reality is bright and cold and painful, she fights to stay in sleep's cocoon as long as she can, forever if possible, that wouldn't be so bad, to spend her life in a coma's warm oblivion. It sounds better than waking and facing the world. The world is so much bigger and crueller than she.

But her body's demands for attention seep into her consciousness like blood into water. She is cold. Her head hurts. Her hand hurts. Her stomach is queasy. The whole world seems to be moving in a strange way, rocking sluggishly from side to side, like a slow continuous earthquake. The body cannot deal with these sensations by itself any longer. Attention must be paid.

It is the cold that eventually forces her into action. She gropes clumsily around without opening her eyes, hoping to find some blanket, and instead her fingers encounter the headboard of the bed she lies on, wood carved into some sort of elaborate pattern, whorls and ridges like a relief map. It occurs to her to wonder where she is, and that is the end of sleep. Her eyes open and immediately shut. The incandescent power of the light above her seems to approach that of the sun. In her eyeblink of vision she saw that the room was tiny but luxuriously appointed, illuminated by a crystal chandelier in the shape of a painfully bright octupus, furnished with two small beds made of some kind of dark wood. The word mahogany comes to her unbidden. Both beds are entirely unfurnished, bare mattresses. A man sleeps on the other bed, someone she knows. The beds are hard against the walls with a channel maybe a foot long between them. The wall by her feet is slightly concave, and inset with a strange circular window, through which cloud-streaked sky can be seen.

She has to fight to call to mind the name for this type of window. Porthole. Yes. She must be on a boat. A very nice boat. With the man whose name eludes her. Her head and hand hurt very much, she knows this abstractly, and the motion of the boat makes her feel nauseous, but there is some kind of disconnect between her and her nervous system, she is aware of the pain and sickness without viscerally feeling it.

How did she get here? She tries to remember the last thing that happened to her, but the door into memory will not open. She casts about for any recollection at all. Jagged, kaleidoscopic images flicker through her mind. Her boyfriend Gavin, in college. Scuba diving on the Baja Peninsula, in her crazy years. Riding a motorcycle through Hampi, in India.

That last is the key that opens the lock. Her eyes snap open and she takes a sharp breath as memory floods into her awareness. Kishkinda. Shadbold. The man who lies next to her is Keiran. The last thing she remembers is wrestling with Laurent. Clearly she lost.

Keiran is still asleep. No; unconscious. His breaths are fast and shallow, nothing like the respiration of deep sleep, and his body glistens with sweat. Like her, he wears only underwear and a T-shirt, the same black You've Been 0//nz0r3d shirt he wore in Vegas. Danielle makes herself sit up, swings her legs to the right, into the narrow crack between the beds. The carpeted floor is very soft. The air mostly smells like a hotel, but also, faintly, of salt, iron, and diesel.

There is a three-foot gap between the heads of the cots and the door, which is solid wood, with an L-shaped metal handle protruding from it. She reaches out, turns the handle, pushes. The door shifts a little but is locked.

The middle finger of her right hand is grossly swollen, bigger than her thumb and almost purple. It dangles across her ring finger at a sickeningly unnatural angle. She remembers Laurent breaking it. It has not been set. She wonders how long they have been here. She is aware of the stream of desperate pain-signals sent by that finger, but somehow they seem not to pierce her.

"Drugs," she says aloud. Her mouth is so dry only a hiss comes out. She looks at her arm, sees a fresh needle mark. That explains the depth of her sleep, the slowness of her thoughts, her immunity to pain and thirst. But this sensory invulnerability will not last long. Her waking testifies to that. Soon she will be in terrible pain. Her skull hurts both externally, where Laurent struck her, and internally, where a devastating headache broods, waiting to erupt. She looks around for water. There is none. Not even a pot to piss in, not that her drug-calcified body will need that anytime soon.

She reaches out and shakes Keiran, careful to use her left hand. Eventually he twitches awake and his dilated eyes open. She waits for his addled stare to become awful comprehension.

"They got us," she says.

"Yeah. What about Jayalitha?"

Danielle tries to remember. "I think she got away."

"Where are we?"

"I think we're on a ship. His ship. Shadbold's." Danielle gets to her feet, unsteadily, her balance would be tenuous even without the slow rise and fall of the floor beneath her, and looks out the porthole. She sees no land, no other boats, not even any birds, nothing but sky and cloud and the vast furrowed sea, gleaming like steel in the midday sun, so enormously monotonous that it looks like a false background, something from a movie or video game.

"Your hand," Keiran says.

Danielle looks down it. "Yeah. It's gonna hurt."

"They could have set it."

"I don't think our well-being is their number one priority."

Keiran rubs at his eyes. "I don't know how we're going to get out of this."

"No."

"I'm very glad I'm on drugs right now."

"They're wearing off," Danielle says.

"Don't remind me. Look." Keiran points to a curved mirror set into a top corner of the room. "One-way glass. There'll be a camera behind it." He waves to it limply.

"I wonder why he didn't just drop us in the ocean," Danielle says. "I guess they still want something from us."

"I'm cold."

"Me too. Come here."

They curl up on Keiran's bed, animals seeking warmth. It is barely big enough for both of them. Danielle cradles her wounded hand in her good one instinctively. It is hurting more and more. His breath is damp against her neck. Her headache is beginning to throb, in waves that seem to come in time with the motion of the ship.

"Maybe," Keiran says, "maybe Trurl and Klaupactus tracked us somehow. Maybe they can send some kind of help."

"Don't be stupid."

"It's possible."

Danielle would shake her head, but it hurts too much. "No it isn't. Don't be an idiot. No one's going to come. And they're not going to let us get away. Not this time."

Keiran swallows. "Yeah."

"I sort of just hope they get it over with soon."

"Don't say that."

"It's true." It is hard to feel frightened of death when she is in great pain, sick and miserable, bereft of hope. Life does not seem precious when it hurts this much.

"I'm sorry," he says eventually.

"Don't be. I got me into this. Not you. I'm sorry they got you too. But I'm glad I'm not alone."

"It's an honour to keep you company," Keiran says, a faint hint of amused vitality entering his voice. "Wouldn't have missed it for the world."

They both fall silent. Danielle closes her eyes and tries not to notice how much she hurts. Amazingly she manages to drift back into sleep for a little longer. She is woken by Keiran detaching his limbs from hers, then slowly climbing over her.

"What is it?" she asks.

"Just looking around." He pushes the door a few times, provoking a dim rattling sound. "Padlocked," he mutters. He examines the porthole, probes the mirror in the corner, lifts the mattresses from the beds and looks at the riveted steel slats underneath. Danielle watches without comment. The drugs have worn off fully now. Her broken finger and ravaging migraine burn with white-hot pain, and her stomach is so uneasy from the ship's motion, and maybe the drug hangover, that she has to concentrate on breathing slowly and not throwing up.

"No getting out of here," he says, sitting down on the other bed with an air of defeat. "No lock on this side, much less anything to pick it with. Pity. I'm a two-time DefCon Lockpick Challenge champion. How's that for an epitaph?"

"Even if we got out," Danielle says, and doesn't bother finishing the sentence.

"Yeah. We'd still be fucked."

"Come back to –"

She stops. There are footprints in the hallway, boots on metal, coming towards them. The sound of a key in a lock. The door opens. Laurent is there, along with two burly men in olive-drab uniforms without insignia, and a tall Indian man in designer finery. The same Indian man who imprisoned Danielle in that hut in Kishkinda, who struck her with the lathi and threatened her with worse, six months ago. Vijay.

"It's time," Laurent says, his face a stern mask. He avoids Danielle's eyes.