A sound. A small splash in the water.

I watch a gray rat run across the deck. Its skin hangs loose on its bones; it has spent so much time hiding that it has not eaten in days.

Quickly, it climbs the wood, scurrying down the bowsprit without stopping. It looks at the felucca that bobs a few yards from the Demeter. It jumps without thinking. Another splash. Faint churning of little limbs. Above the persistent thrum of the sea, it is nigh-on imperceptible unless one knows what is happening. But I do. I saw that first rat rush, guilty, toward the water and the ship that could whisk it away from a certain death.

Falling bodies, tiny shipwrecks.

Even when they fall no more, I keep hearing them.

A Turkish officer looks at the Demeter, then at the rats that swim toward his boat. He whispers some words I cannot hear and steers away, toward the coast.

We will go out to the Aegean Sea in a couple of hours, when it gets dark.