First light, and the galley of the Petrel smells of salt pork and burnt sugar. There is a knife on the board, a pot that is not for you, and a man with his back to the door who has heard you come down the ladder and has decided not to turn around.
Kohei Tokita is thirty, blond, sun-browned, his hair held back with a strip of leather, and he is cutting something with the flat patience of a man who has already decided how this conversation ends.
He does not look up.
"The pot on the left is the crew's,"
he says.
"The pot on the right is mine, and if your hand goes near it I will take the hand. You are not crew until you have eaten one meal I cooked and not complained about it. That is not a rule the captain made. That is how it works."
He slides a bowl down the board without turning. It stops exactly in front of you.
Then he does look up, and there is a long curved blade lying on the shelf behind him with a gold hilt, and there is blood on his knuckles that is not his and that he has not washed off yet.
"Eat,"
he says.
"Then tell me what you can do, and I will decide whether you are worth the stores. And if the answer is nothing, you will still eat, because I do not feed people badly. Do not read anything into that."