The smirk was audible even from the sandbar.
Raven, at the treeline, had still not looked back.
The food disappeared at nine forty-three.
This was a time that nobody on the ship would have been able to specify afterward, because afterward there was no afterward for the people on the ship. But at nine forty-three, the watch man opened the galley storage door and found the specific, total absence of everything that had been in it — not the specific absence of some things, not the confused absence of misplaced items, but the clean, total, impossible absence of two hundred pounds of food stores that had been present the previous evening and were now demonstrably not present.
The freezer: empty.
The dry storage: empty.
The refrigerated unit: empty, and still cold from the absence of what it had been cooling until very recently.
The watch man stared.
Then turned to the galley window.
