Soft Goods (Grain Series)

The berth was the tightest on the short arm and everyone said so. Notwithstanding had understood, coming in, that this was the thing to be glad of. Cane had traded a good adjustable for the curtain — heavy stuff, weighted at the hem — and after he hung it you could not hear the trolley run at all. He had packed out the plate behind the head of the frame, where the cold used to come through off the bulk, so that she stopped waking with her scalp aching. He had gone up into the space with a light in his teeth and taken the note out of the return, because she could not get past the note into sleep, and it never made the note again. She was glad. She said so, and meant it, and lay in the dark afterward with the feeling she had brought in with her from Cass and had never once been able to put anywhere: that the place did not want her in it. Not Cane. Not the hold, which had been correct with her. The arm itself, the plate, the fold of the deck, the way the whole thing sat around her while…