Based upon his beard, S. decides to refer to the sailor with unsewn lips as “Maelstrom.”

A Maelstrom has dual meanings, of which the character embraces both: as violent whirlpool and/or a chaotic state of affairs.

Maelstrom shows S. the pinpoint scars around his mouth, revealing that his lips, at some point, were also sewn. This reveals more about the ritual of sewing the sailors’ lips, but also that at some point, Maelstrom was low enough in the ranks to have his lips sewn.

In the footnotes, F.X.C. talks about Straka’s agent Lewis Looper’s disappearances. She italicizes the word “second,” in “after the second disappearance.” There was only one disappearance, so Jen and Eric figure out that this is pointing to the second footnote of the chapter, where there is a cipher.

Eric asks “What if VMS was his own publisher? Karst didn’t publish much else.”

There is no conclusive evidence for or against this argument, feeding further into the mystery.