Kaz Vetrov April 2nd, 941 A.M. Lenadra, I know you will never read this, but it helps to write as if you might. The sea has been kind the last week. Low swell, steady wind, gray sky that makes the water look like hammered steel. Men complain about the cold and the food and the smell, same as always. I complain too, but only a little. Work is work, and this is better than hauling slag up and down the Warrens. They say Svalbard is ahead of us, a little bite of Atlantis carved out of the ice. The oicers keep calling it "a strategic port," which means nothing to a man like me except that there will be shore leave if nobody dies on the way in. I am hoping for fresh bread, a place where the €oor does not move, and a letter from you waiting at some clerk’s window. Maybe that is too much hope for one trip. The Dominion is an impressive beast. You can feel it in your bones when the engines change pitch. Sometimes at night, when my watch is done, I go up to the rail and look back along her length. All that iron and the Shard-wheels, chugging along like a caged storm. It is easy to believe the things they say: that this ship is the future, that men like me are lucky to serve on her. Still, there are whispers in the mess. Cargo that no one is allowed near. Entire compartments sealed o. Oicers coming back from meetings looking like they swallowed a ghost. I try not to listen. It’s easier to sleep when I think about you instead. I think about the way my world always seems brighter when we’re together. Sometimes I imagine you standing in the doorway of our shop in St. Pete, hands on your hips, telling me “You’re a fool Kaz Vetrov, but at least you're pretty”. I can hear your voice as I write this, and it makes me smile. It reminds me that you were always my reason to be the best version of myself. For now, I will trust that this is just another job, and I can still be a decent man so far from home. April 9th, 941 A.M. Today I did something stupid, Lena. Maybe it was brave. It feels stupid. We have been at the dock in Atlantis for days, and everything about this stop has been wrong. The air on shore smells like sickness. There are rumors of some outbreak in the poorer quarters, whole streets turned away from the gates. The oicers talk in low voices. Nobody will tell us what is in the sealed holds. This morning they lined us up on deck and marched us below, ten at a time, to the infirmary. "Standard inoculations," they said. "Company protocol. No exceptions." Men who balked were threatened with brig time and loss of pay. I watched them stick every arm, mine included. It glowed faint green in the syringe and it turned my stomach when they injected it. I can’t say as to what it was or what it did. The doctor treated me like livestock as he pushed me through the line. I asked my section lead what exactly we were being protected from. He told me “Shut your mouth and show your arm!”. I did. After, when they let us back into the passageway, I pulled him aside and asked again, quieter, whether the Dominion had anything to do with the rumors about plague coming from the shore. He looked at me like I was a rat that had started speaking. "Your job is to carry out orders and draw pay, Vetrov," he said. "The purpose of this voyage is far above your pay-grade. If you want to keep your job, you’ll stop thinking about it." I told him that the hold had been under extra guard since we arrived and that if we were carrying something that could hurt people we all had a right to know. He grabbed my shirt, shoved me against the bulkhead, and said one word through his teeth. "Enough." Then he let me go and walked away like I had never existed. I don’t know what we did in Svalbard. Lena, if you were here I know you would tell me to keep asking and to trust my gut. Instead I am sitting on my bunk, scratching at the place where the needle went in, and trying not to think about where this ship is going next. If anything happens to me, and this book finds you somehow, remember this: I tried to ask. I didn’t just look away. April 24th, 941 A.M. I can see our shop from here. It's right there and yet it feels like its across the Sea of Ghosts. They are holding us at anchor in the bay while the First Mate argues with the city envoy about our "health status." That is what the captain called it at muster. Health status. Men coughed behind their hands when he said it. No one laughed. Since Atlantis, the mood on the Dominion has gone from uneasy to sour. I went to Petrov again last night. I told him that if there is something wrong with the cargo, or with us, the people in that city deserve to know before we tie up at the docks. I told him I have a wife in the Warrens who breathes that air, drinks that water, fills prescriptions and tries to cure the rich and poor alike. He told me if I mention my concerns in front of anyone else, I will be written up as unfit for duty and will be left behind on the next voyage. He said there are people aboard whose job it is to make these decisions, and that I am not one of them. Then he did something that scared me more than the threat. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, softly, that if I care about my wife, I should keep my mouth shut, finish this voyage, and find work on a di‡erent ship after. "Men who ask questions on a vessel like this do not last long," he said. "Friends or not." Friends or not. So here I am, sitting on my bunk with this book in my lap, the ship humming around me, the city where you sleep a mile away and yet an eternity away. I don't know if I will be allowed to set foot on those docks, or if some quiet word from above will see me “reassigned”. You are the best part of me, Lenadra. If I don’t make it back to the Warrens, please remember that I did not go quietly.