Raju nods as he picks up the bench, moving it out of the way. His thoughts, even after so long in this impossible place, move more easily into explicable patterns: Francis' steward was there, alive, and is here, alive, and what had happened — what Francis insists had happened, what William says happened to him, what Raju has no option but to trust — between the two points is easy for his mind to skirt the edges of like walking around a puddle, without quite stepping in the middle unless something else should draw his foot there.

"Instead of one of the others you'd sailed with before?" he asks, moving over to the chair Francis had been sitting in to move that as well. "He must have made an impression that first time."