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The needle wore a path of dye and scab round and round Patience’s left ring finger; sweltering heat adhered her to the mold-scarred chair. The hurt didn’t bother her. It was pain with a future. She glanced past the scarrist’s bare scalp, through the grimy window, holding her eyes open around the prickle of tears.

Behind the rain, she could pick out the jeweled running lamps of a massive spacelighter sliding through clouds, coming in soft toward the waterlogged sprawl of a spaceport named for Lake Pontchartrain. On a clear night she could have seen its train of cargo capsules streaming in harness behind. Patience bit her lip and looked away: not down at the needle, but across at a wall shaggy with peeling paint.

Lake Pontchartrain was only a name now, a salt-clotted estuary of the rising Gulf. But it persisted — like the hot bright colors of bougainvillea grown in wooden washpails beside doors, like the Mardi Gras floats that now floated for real — in the memory of New Orleanians, as grand a legacy as anything the underwater city could claim. Patience’s hand lay open on the wooden chair arm as if waiting for a gift. She didn’t look down and she didn’t close her eyes as the needle pattered and scratched, pattered and scratched. The long Poplar Street barge undulated under the tread of feet moving past the scarrist’s, but his fingers were steady as a gin-soaked frontier doctor’s.

The prick and shift of the needle stopped and the pock-faced scarrist sat back on his heels. He set his tools aside and made a practiced job of applying the quickseal. Patience looked down at her hands, at the palm fretted indigo to mark her caste. At the filigree of emerald and crimson across the back of her right hand, and underneath the transparent sealant swathing the last two fingers of her left.

A peculiar tightness blossomed under her breastbone. She started to raise her left hand and press it to her chest to ease the tension, stopped herself just in time, and laid the hand back on the chair. She pushed herself up with her right hand only and said, “Thank you.”

She gave the scarrist a handful of cash chits, once he’d stripped his gloves and her blood away. His hands were the silt color he’d been born with, marking him a tradesman; the holographic slips of poly she paid with glittered like fish scales against his skin.

“Won’t be long before you’ll have the whole hand done.” He rubbed a palm across his sweat-slick scalp. He had tattoos of his own, starting at the wrists — dragons and mermaids and manatees, arms and chest tesseraed in oceanic beasts. “You’ve earned two fingers in six months. You must be studying all the time.”

“I want my kid to go to trade school so we can get berths outbound,” Patience said, meeting the scarrist’s eyes so squarely that he looked down and pocketed his hands behind the coins, like pelicans after fish. “I don’t want him to have to sell his indenture to survive, like I did.” She smiled. “I tell him he should study engineering, be a professional, get the green and red. Or maintenance tech, keep his hands clean. Like yours. He wants to be an artist, though. Not much call for painters up there. ”

The scarrist grunted, putting his tools away. “There’s more to life than lighters and cargo haulers, you know.”

Her sweeping gesture took in the little room and the rainy window. The pressure in her chest tightened, a trap squeezing her heart, holding her in place, pinned. “Like this?”

He shrugged, looked up, considered. “Sure. Like this. I’m a free man, I do what I like.” He paused. “Your kid any good?”

“As an artist?” A frown pulled the corner of her lip down. Consciously, she smoothed her hand open so she wouldn’t squeeze and blur her new tattoos. “Real good. No reason he can’t do it as a hobby, right?”

“Good? Or good?”

Blood scorched her cheeks. “Real good.”

The scarrist paused. She’d known him for years: six fingers and a thumb, seven examinations passed. Three more left. “If he keeps his hands clean. When you