She gazed idly out at the huge rusting hulk of the oil tanker beached permanently on the sands of the shallow coastline. Some twenty thousand people lived in the gutted remains of that ship, a ragged army of homeless. Many of them labored on the breaking crews that went out each day to work over the junked ships towed into the bay, huge derelicts whose faceless owners had sold them for scrap to the city council. Using nothing more sophisticated than hammers, the tanker people broke their backs pounding up those hulks for the metal. They got peanuts for the scrap—just enough to subsist—while the city fathers reckoned the price they paid for the abandoned ships cheap if it kept twenty thousand social misfits from preying on the tourists. Kristen knew one or two of the wreckers, but still hadn’t fallen so low herself.