Everybody looked at her.
"He asked me," she said. "I said I would think. Then I didn't do it. He didn't ask again."
Octavia sat with that for a moment. She could feel the shape of the thing now, all of it, the way you can feel the shape of a room in the dark once your eyes adjust. A short-crewed boat. An owner's office that said no. A captain who believed, with his whole stubborn Welsh heart, that the job of a captain was to stand between his crew and whatever was coming, and who had stood there so long and so hard that he had stopped being able to tell the difference between protecting them and lying for them. And a boy from Aberdeen with an orange beard he couldn't grow, standing on a dark foredeck at eleven at night with a bow line in his hands, under a swinging boat, because there was nobody else.
"Thank you," she said. "All of you. I know what that cost."
"What happens now?" Solveig asked.
"Now I talk to the weather router," Octavia said, and looked at her watch, which said two minutes to two. "And then I talk to your captain again."
Dex had set up the call in the chart room behind the wheelhouse, a little space with a desk and a printer and a bank of radios. Lenora at Tidemark Weather came through on the speaker with the faint echo of a woman working in a big empty office somewhere, which Octavia knew was actually a converted barn in Vermont with a satellite dish on the roof.
"Octavia. You sound terrible."
"Thank you, Lenora. Tell me the window."
"The window's what I told your boy at twelve-thirty, but tighter. The Hatteras low deepened another four millibars since the morning run. Every model's got it now. If Coriolis is past Brenton Reef by eighteen hundred, she runs down the backside of the front with northwesterlies on the starboard quarter, she's across the Stream by Wednesday morning before the low gets its act together, she's in St. George's Thursday lunchtime. If she leaves at nineteen hundred, it starts getting uncomfortable. If she leaves at twenty hundred, I won't route her. She'd be in the Stream with thirty-five knots from the northeast against a three-knot current. You know what that looks like."