It was the engineer who offered to show me. Not the heiress. Not the captain.

Do you want to see how it actually works.

The door opened onto the skeleton of the ship.

“The grid was sixty percent coal,” he said. “When we were printing the lattice sections. The critics have noted this. They are not wrong.”

“But the alternative wasn’t a smaller boat. It was a dirtier boat. I was not offered the option of ethics.”

“The physics is clean,” he said. “The result is compromised. Both things are true.”

He kept his hand on the tank.

“It’s the only place on this ship where nothing is performing. Everything here is just doing exactly what it does. Not what it looks like. Not what it’s supposed to mean. Just what it is.”

I understood what he meant. I also understood that the room was three decks below the reef.