She closed her notebook. Some crossings need no words. Only the steady, patient engine of a vessel that learned, long ago, that home is not a place you leave. It is a language you never stop learning how to speak.

When the captain announced a storm over the Ionian Sea, she did not simply say oluja . She translated the fear in his knuckles. When the young mother from Aleppo asked for water, Mira translated the drought in her throat — three years of silence, five checkpoints, one child who still cried for a garden of jasmine that no longer existed.

On the deck of the Krstarica , under a sky bruised purple by the diesel smoke of three nations, Mira stood with her headphones half-on. The ship was a floating Babel: Croatian engineers shouting over hydraulic schematics, Filipino waiters humming karaoke in the pantry, Italian officers cursing the GPS, and Somali asylum seekers teaching each other card games in the cargo hold.

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