With all the talk of ghosts, Starling was both apprehensive and enthusiastic to be standing the middle watch, that cold and habitually gloomy period between moonset and sunrise where the sky was perfectly black, and you could look all you like and not make out a single glimmer for miles around. In the Erins, there was not much in the way of ghost stories, and so Starling found himself at a vulnerable disadvantage; he had none of the little charms and prayers and cross-your-fingers that a human boy his own age would have grown up with to ward off spirits. At the same time, he had less of a fear than that same human child might have had, largely because the concept of ghosts as the dead had no place in his mind. All the ghosts he had ever experienced--the ones in Cnoch-na-Niall and Elaine’s mother on the Red Morning--had simply been loud, invisible things that slammed doors. Not so much more interesting than your average boggart, if you got right down to it. The silent, glowing-white, vaguely humanoid ghost was not part of his mental landscape.

Until one passed by, close enough to touch, on the deck.

He jumped, heart hammering, before he realised it was only Spider. “Are you on watch?” he called after her.

She didn’t seem to hear him. Or at least, she didn’t acknowledge him. Since he couldn’t think of anything he’d done in the past little while to deserve Spider’s cold shoulder, he frowned to himself and started after her, catching up quickly to her slow stride. “Spider?”

Once he drew up beside her, he saw that her eyes were wide-open, but blank, drained-looking. Her face in the dim light was a slack grey mask. Her arms hung at her side as if there were rocks tied to her wrists. She wasn’t seeing him, or from the looks of things, anything else either.

That, he recognised, even though he’d never witnessed sleepwalking firsthand. “Spider,” he said gently, tapping her shoulder as he walked alongside her. “Hey, Spider? You’re on the deck. Wake up now. Spider?”

She made a sleepy noise, and for a moment he thought she was waking up. The tap to her shoulder veered her off-course, scaring Starling into thinking she was going to topple over. He snatched for her wrist and missed it, scaring him nearly enough to piss himself; if she had been falling, he would have failed at intervening. But she straightened out and walked on. Halfway across the deck, she opened a hatch and went down it.

Starling’s tongue stuck to the roof of his suddenly dry mouth. He couldn’t decide if she really was walking in her sleep, or if she was playing a weird prank on him; they’d descended to such ignoble artillery in the past. People who were really asleep couldn’t climb down a ladder. Maybe. He didn’t know. He thought about calling Edric down from the aft and telling him what was happening, but found himself torn. If it was a prank, he would be playing right into her hands by panicking. If it wasn’t, and he left her, they might come back to find she’d broken her neck at the bottom of the hatch.

He couldn’t see her as he hurried down the ladder, and by the time he was secure on the floor, she was nowhere to be found. This section of below only offered two directions, right and left. He went right, counting on luck, but before he could take more than four steps in that direction, a heavy pounding made him look back over his shoulder. It sounded like someone tapping in a line of pegs with a wooden mallet.

“Spider?” he called out, starting off in the other direction, toward the knocking. “If you’re messin’ with me head, I want you to know that I am completely aware of it and I’m only here takin’ the moral high ground on the very slim chance that there’s really something wrong.”

Except somehow he had missed her. The steady pounding was now in back of him. He turned around and walked more slowly, scrutinising any narrow sidelong niche he might have missed, and bracing himself for the inevitable moment when she jumped out at him. “And just so you know,” he added aloud, “this is stupid.”

He caught a pale flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye, looked down, and was suddenly on his knees trying to wrench Spider out of the tiny gap between a spool of wire and a retaining wall. The gods alone knew how she squeezed herself into it to begin with, even as skinny as she was. He had to twist her sidewise and practically drag her along the floor to pull her out, and by that time she was awake, cursing under her breath and scrabbling at him with her claws.

“What the hell are you doin’?” She jerked herself away and promptly banged the back of her head against the spool. “Ouch!”

Rubbing the point of her skull, she looked around with mounting fear at the unfamiliar territory.

“I’m not doin’ anything.” He took his hands off her and sat back on his heels. “You were walkin’ in your sleep,” he told her, loud and slow as if she might still be half-asleep. “You don’t remember.”

She started to shake her head, but then put her hand to the swelling sore spot on her forehead. Her touch described a protuberance that felt, without seeing it, as big and hard as an apple. “You didn’t have to hit me,” she muttered.

Starling sucked in his breath in shock. “I never did! Maybe you did it yourself. I don’t know. I just followed you. You wouldn’t wake up when I called you before.”

Gradually Spider’s eyes, rotten enough in most light, adjusted to the darkness. Blurry slabs of shadow resolved into shapes, and she grasped where she was. A little squeak came out of her throat instead of words, like one of those nightmares where you could never scream loud enough. “Star?” she said faintly. “Take me up top. Please. Take me up top.”

Hearing Spider nervous made him nervous too. He stood up and put a hand out for her. “Can you walk? Are you dizzy or anything?”