The old woman—Judge 2, the pirates called her—her throat was a mass of cartilage and gristle, tough as wire beneath her skin’s false smoothness. Twice, when Nora thought she was dead at last, the pirate woman had lurched shudderingly into life again with a tortured rasp in the darkness. Nora’s wrists bled freely from the old woman’s splintered nails. The body stank.