"I know what it looks like."
"After this, nothing until Friday the twenty-third at the earliest. The low stalls, there's a second one behind it. And I'm watching something east of the Leewards that I don't love." A pause. "Is she going?"
"I don't know yet."
"Well," Lenora said, "you've got four hours to find out."
When Octavia came out of the chart room, Kemble was standing at the top of the crew stairs with his phone in his hand and his face arranged into an expression of patient concern, and behind him, standing on the pier at the foot of the passerelle in his navy windbreaker, being held there by the deckhand on gangway watch, was Silvino Arruda from the gatehouse, holding something in his closed fist.
"He says he needs to see you," the deckhand on the gangway said, apologetically. "He won't say what about. I told him we're not taking visitors."
"It's all right," Octavia said. "Let him up."
Silvino came up the passerelle slowly, the way a man walks on a boat he thinks he has no right to be on, one hand on the rope. At the top he stopped and looked at Kemble, and then at her, and then down at his own closed fist, as though he were surprised to find it still there.
"Can I talk to you," he said. "Just you."