Water hit the deck plating in sheets, each wave a slap of black brine across Toma Vasquez's chest as he hauled himself through the half-submerged mess hall of the Resolute. The overhead lights were dead. Emergency strips flickered in their housings, casting the long room in stuttering amber that made the floating debris look like things waiting to be named.
"Forward," he said, voice stripped down to its bones by the cold. "Stay on the starboard bench. The deck slopes to port and your boots won't find purchase."
Behind him, three dockworkers followed in a ragged line. Each had a coil of rescue line over one shoulder and a salvaged breather mask strapped to their faces. None of them were soldiers anymore. None of them had been for years. But Toma had learned a long time ago that you did not stop being what you had been just because you stopped getting paid for it.
The mess hall had been a pleasant room once, he remembered from the loading charts. Long tables for two hundred passengers. A galley window where the cook had served something passable. Now the water stood three feet deep along the port wall and climbed toward the ceiling as you went aft, where the hull had torn open against the rock shelf nobody should have drifted near.
"Chief." One of the dockworkers, a woman named Pell, pointed at a shape in the water. "There. Under the third bench."
Toma saw it. A hand, pale fingers curled around a bench leg, the rest of the body wedged beneath the table. He dropped to one knee, ignoring the black water that broke across his ribs, and reached in.
The hand was cold. Colder than the water. He wrapped his fingers around the wrist and pulled, slow and steady, the way you pulled a child from a collapsed shelf. The body came free with a sucking sound, dragging with it a length of torn curtain and the sour smell of bilge and fear.
"Get her up," he told Pell. "Check the pulse."
Pell worked. The other two dockworkers spread out along the bench line, probing the shadows with their lamp beams. Toma stayed where he was, one hand on the unconscious woman's shoulder, watching the water level. It was not rising as fast now. The breach had found its level. That was good. That was also the problem. The Resolute was settling into its grave, and every minute spent down here was a minute spent closer to the bottom.
On the bridge, or what passed for a bridge now, Vega Maren sat at the comms array with a dead officer's headset clamped over one ear. Her fingers moved across the patched console in slow, deliberate patterns, pulling signal from noise the way you pulled thread from a ruined hem. She had been at it for nine hours. Her back was a single locked muscle. Her eyes burned in the familiar way she had learned not to mention.
The headset fed her a wash of static and the occasional fragment of something that might have been a voice. She did not let herself hope for the fragments. Hope was a thing she rationed.
"Vega." Ren Tass stood at the hatch behind her, frame filling the doorway. He had the look of a man who had not slept in two days and would not admit it. "Toma's team found another one in the water. Still no word from aft compartments. The hull is creaking."
"Hulls creak," Vega said, not turning. "Mine does it every time the pressure shifts. It does not mean anything is collapsing."
"That is not what I said."
"No." She kept her eyes on the console. "You said it was creaking. I am telling you what creaking means. Nothing. Continue."
Ren did not continue. He stayed where he was for a long breath, then turned and was gone.
Vega let her hand rest on the console for a moment, feeling the faint vibration of the dying ship travel through the metal and into her palm. She knew what the ship was doing. She had read enough maritime postmortems to know the stages. The Resolute was in the slow slide, the long surrender. It would not sink like a stone. It would settle, groan, and settle again, until the water found every space and the air was pushed up and out of the cracks. Then it would go.
She had maybe six hours. Maybe four. The salvage crews were working the upper holds, picking through cargo and the bodies of crewmen who had died at their posts. Toma and his people were the only ones belowdecks. Vega had not told them how little time there was. She did not see the point. They knew. Everyone on a sinking ship knew.
She turned back to the console and began the patient work of coaxing one more signal out of the wreckage.
In the mess hall, Toma counted heads. Five survivors pulled from the water so far. Four adults, one child. The child had been locked in a supply closet when the breach happened, which had saved her from the water but might yet kill her from the cold. He had wrapped her in one of the dockworker's coats and sent her up with Pell and the first batch.
That left two of his original three dockworkers, and himself. And the mess hall, and whatever might be in the crew quarters beyond the galley door.
"The door is jammed," one of the dockworkers reported, a man named Calloway who had been a stonecutter before he had been anything else. He stood at the galley door with both palms flat against it, his lamplight catching the warped metal. "Something heavy against it on the other side. I cannot shift it."
"Then we go through the wall," Toma said. He moved to the bulkhead beside the door and ran his palm across the paneling. The mess hall had been built in a hurry, the way most commercial ships were built. The panels were decorative, not structural. Beneath them, the true ribs of the ship showed through where the water had peeled the facing away.
"Here," he said. He tapped a spot with the heel of his hand. "Hollow. The frames are six inches behind this. Pass me the pry bar from the kit."
Calloway passed it. Toma set the bar against the paneling and leaned his weight into it. The panel bowed, cracked, and came away in two pieces. Behind it, the gap between decorative facing and true hull was dark and tight, but a man could fit if he did not mind scraping his shoulders.
"I am going through," Toma said. "Hold the line. If the water rises faster than I am moving, pull me back."
He did not wait for an answer. He did not give speeches. He slid into the gap, the pry bar in one hand and his lamp in the other, and began the slow crawl toward whatever was on the other side of the wall.
The space between panels smelled of damp wood and old varnish. His shoulders caught on every seam. His breath came back to him hot against his face, and he could feel his own pulse in the cramped dark. He had done worse things in worse places, and he had done them younger, and he had done them for pay. Now he did them because they were his people in there, his dock, his responsibility, and he could not look at himself in a mirror otherwise.
The far side of the wall came up under his hand. He braced the bar and pushed.
The panel on the crew quarters side came away easier than he expected, and he nearly fell through into the room beyond. He caught himself on the frame and lowered himself down into water that came up to his thighs. The crew quarters were larger than the mess hall, a long dormitory lined with bunks, and the water here was black and still.
"Anyone here," he called. His voice came back flat and small. "This is Toma Vasquez from the salvage. If you can move, come toward my light. If you cannot move, make a sound."
He waited. The water moved against his legs in slow, patient pushes. Somewhere ahead, something dripped into something larger, a plunk and a small ring that went on and on.
A sound came. Coughing. Wet, racking coughing, and then a voice, thin and stripped.
"Here." The voice was female, younger than his daughter would have been. "Here. I cannot. My leg."
Toma turned his lamp toward the voice. A woman lay across two bunks that had collapsed into each other, her left leg bent at an angle that made him look at the ceiling for a moment. She was conscious. She was pale. She was not going to walk out of here.
"Can you move your hands," he said.
"Yes."
"Good. I am going to bring people. You stay awake. Talk to me. What is your name."
"Yara. Yara Ondek. I was in bunk fourteen. The ship. The ship made a sound and then I was here."
"Keep talking," Toma said, already turning back toward the wall. "Tell me what you had for breakfast."
"I do not remember."
"Then tell me something else. Anything. Keep your mouth working."
He did not wait to see if she did. He slid back into the gap between panels and emerged into the mess hall with water streaming from him, his chest heaving, his face set in the lines that age and old campaigns had carved there.
"Broken leg," he told Calloway. "And possibly more. We need the splint from the kit and a second line. Get Pell back down here with two more people. We have a difficult carry."
Calloway nodded and moved. Toma stood for a moment in the mess hall, his hands on his knees, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth, the way his old sergeant had taught him in a training yard in a place that no longer existed. The ship groaned around him. A plate somewhere forward shifted and rang against its neighbor like a struck drum.
He straightened up. He had work to do.
On the bridge, Vega pulled a signal out of the noise. It was faint, broken into syllables by the interference of the storm that still pressed against the upper hull, but it was a voice, and it was saying something she could almost understand.
She held her breath. She did not mean to. She caught herself doing it and let it out through her teeth in a long, slow push.
The voice came again. Two words. A name. Then the signal collapsed into static and would not come back.
Vega sat very still for a moment, one hand on the console, the other curled in her lap where no one could see it. The name had been a name she recognized. She was not yet sure what it meant. She would have to think about it. She would have to decide what to do with it.
She turned and looked at the doorway where Ren had been standing. He was not there now. The bridge was hers alone, and the dying ship, and the small weight of the name she had just been given.
The corridor had folded like a fist.
Vega found the breach on the starboard side, two decks down from the mess hall, where a transverse beam had given way under the storm's sustained assault. The deck plating there had buckled into a shallow V, edges curled upward, and the space between them was a throat of darkness that breathed dust and the faint copper of old hydraulic fluid. She could hear water somewhere, not running but held, trapped in a pocket of the hull, shifting when the ship shifted.
"Here," Ren called from ahead. He was crouched beside a tear in the partition wall, his shoulder pressed flat against the buckled plating, one arm threaded into a gap that should not have existed. "I've got a hand. Small. There's a child in here."
Vega knelt beside him. The gap was narrow, the edges ragged, and she could see now what he meant: a wrist, thin, the sleeve of a jacket darkened with grime, fingers that twitched when Ren spoke. The hand looked too pale against the soot.
"Talk to them," she said. "Keep them with us."
Ren leaned closer. "Hey. Hey in there. We're going to get you out. I need you to stay very still and answer me. How many are with you?"
A pause. The wrist turned, the fingers found the edge of the tear, and gripped. A voice came, thin and careful, the kind of voice that had learned to be small.
"Two."
Vega looked at Ren. He looked back at her, and she read the same calculation in his face: a small body wedged into a collapsed space, a partner somewhere behind them, and no way to know how stable the surrounding structure was. The deck above them groaned as the ship rolled, a long complaint that vibrated in her molars.
"We're going to widen this," she said, and began to work.
The plate resisted at first, then gave in a single reluctant yield, peeling back enough to show them the shape of the space beyond. A pocket had formed between the outer hull and a fallen stanchion, the kind of accidental shelter that ships built for themselves in the last moments before they came apart. Two figures were pressed into it, backs to the curved metal, knees drawn up, faces half-hidden by the dark.
The larger one moved first. A hand reached up and found the edge of the gap, and a young woman pulled herself forward into the light, dragging the smaller figure with her by the wrist. She was slight, dark-haired, her face drawn with dust and something more patient than fear. The child beside her was perhaps twelve, gangly, with the same sharp features and a bruise coming up along one cheekbone. Both of them blinked at Vega and Ren as if the light were a language they had forgotten.
"Don't move yet," Vega said. "Tell me if anything hurts."
The young woman's gaze moved over her, assessing, the way a person assesses a doorway before stepping through it. "Nothing's broken," she said. Her voice was calm, almost too calm, the steadiness of someone who had decided to be steady long before this moment. "Kit scraped his face on a strut. It's not deep."
"I'm fine," the child said quickly, and then, as if testing the claim, "I'm fine."
Vega looked at the smaller one, at the bruise and the scrapes and the stubborn set of his jaw. "What's your name?"
"Kit Bardin." He said it the way children say things they have been told to say to strangers, with the formality of a rehearsed line. Then, because he was twelve and twelve will out: "Are we going to die?"
"No," Vega said. "You're not."
The young woman shifted, and Vega saw that she was bracing the child against her side, that her arm was around his shoulders in a way that was not casual. Sibling, then. The resemblance was there in the angle of the jaw, the way the eyes were set, the way they both held themselves in the small space as if they had been practicing this posture for years.
"I'm Juno," the young woman said. "His sister. We were in the lower berth when the beam came down. We heard it go. We didn't have time to get to a hatch."
"You did the right thing," Ren said. He was already signaling to two of the deck crew who had come up behind them. "We need a line under each of them, and someone to take Kit first. The gap's too narrow for two."
Juno looked at him, then at Vega, and something in her expression shifted, a careful measure being taken. "There were others in our berth. A family with two younger children. They were in the compartment aft of ours. We heard them shouting, and then we didn't."
Vega held her gaze. "We're working through the ship. We will find them."
"Will you tell us?" Juno's voice did not rise. It stayed level, and that levelness was its own kind of plea. "If you find them. Or if you don't. I would rather know than not."
"Yes," Vega said. "I will tell you."
Juno nodded once, as if she had been given a small and exact thing she intended to keep. She turned to the child beside her, and her hand found the back of his neck, and she spoke to him in a voice that was different from the one she had used for Vega, lower, without the careful edges.
"Kiddo. These people are going to help us out. I need you to go first, and I need you to do exactly what they say. Can you do that?"
"I can do that," Kit said. His chin came up, and for a moment he looked like a different person, someone who had decided to be brave in public. Then his hand found his sister's sleeve, and the bravery thinned, and he let himself be guided toward the gap where Ren waited with a line.
It took longer than it should have. The deck shifted under them as they worked, a slow lateral motion that made Vega's stomach lift and settle, and once the child cried out as a piece of loose plating caught him across the shoulder. Juno made a sound that was not a word, and Vega heard in it the particular sharpness of a person who could not reach the thing that was hurting. Ren got the line under the boy's arms, and two of the deck crew pulled him through, and then it was Juno's turn, and Juno came through the gap with her shoulders turned and her breath held and no sound at all.
She stood for a moment in the corridor, one hand against the wall, and looked at her brother, who was being checked over by a medic who had appeared from somewhere. Kit was talking, the words coming fast and a little too high, and the medic was listening with the patient face of someone who had learned that the talking was the work.
Juno crossed the space between them in three steps and put her hand on the back of Kit's head, and the boy stopped talking, and the corridor was quieter for a moment, and the smallness of that gesture, the absolute ordinariness of it, struck Vega in a place she had thought she had closed off years ago.
She turned away. She had to. There was work.
"Vega." Juno's voice, behind her. "I want to help. I know this class of ship. My people fixed things like it. Tell me where to go."
Vega looked back at her. The young woman was standing straight now, the dust still on her face, the steadiness in her shoulders that she had carried through the gap and out of it. She was not asking to be useful as a favor. She was offering, and the offer had the weight of someone who had been useful for a long time and intended to keep being so.
"There is a family," Vega said. "A woman and two children. They were berthed aft of your compartment. The corridor between is compromised. I need someone who can read structure, who can tell me if it is safe to send a team in or if we will lose more people trying."
Juno's gaze sharpened. "Show me."
Vega led her two compartments down, where a section of the corridor had partially collapsed into the deck below. The breach was smaller here, a long diagonal tear rather than a folded fist, and through it they could see the compartment on the other side, a wedge of berths and storage lockers, a child's shoe on the floor, a curtain that had come loose from its rod and hung at an angle. The compartment was dark. Nothing moved in it.
Juno crouched at the edge of the breach and studied the surrounding structure for a long moment. Her hands moved, not touching, but tracing the lines of the beams, the way they joined, the way the plating had failed. Vega watched her work and saw, in the careful attention, the evidence of a craft learned over years. This was not guesswork. This was a person who had taken apart a hundred such joints and knew what they looked like when they were about to give.
"The lower beam is compromised," Juno said finally, "but the upper is still taking load. If you brace here, and here, before anyone goes through, you have a chance. Without the braces, anyone who puts weight on the lower edge will bring the rest of it down."
"Can you mark it for my people?"
Juno reached for a piece of chalk from the deck crew's kit and made three precise marks on the plating. "Here. And these two. The braces go across, not along. Tell them that, or they will do it wrong."
"I will tell them."
Juno stood. They were both still for a moment, looking through the breach at the dark compartment on the other side, at the child's shoe and the loose curtain and the silence.
"The family," Juno said. "What were their names?"
"I don't know yet. We have a partial list from the berth manifest. The woman was traveling under Cardew. The children were not named separately."
Juno's mouth tightened, just slightly. "Kit and I have been on ships like this for six years. We've learned the names of the families in our berth the first day, because you have to, because you might need to call for them in the dark. The mother was Halla. The boy was Benn. The girl was Lira. Lira had a cough she'd had for a week. She was sleeping nearest the bulkhead."
Vega looked at her. "You might have just saved my people from making a mistake that would have cost them."
"Then send them in," Juno said. "And send me with them. I know where Lira was sleeping. I know the layout of that berth the way I know the layout of our own."
"You've just come out of a collapse. I can't ask you to go back into one."
"You didn't ask." Juno's voice was quiet, but it did not waver. "I told you. I know this class of ship. I know where to step. And those are children in there, and if Lira has been lying on that deck for an hour with a cough and whatever the collapse did to her, then she needs someone who can find her quickly, not someone who is going to learn the layout as they go."
Vega held her gaze. She thought of Sable, somewhere on this ship, somewhere she could not reach. She thought of the particular cruelty of asking a person to walk back into the place that had just tried to kill them. She thought of Lira with a cough and a bruise she could not see, waiting in the dark.
"Stay on the braces," she said. "Stay on the lines I marked. If anything shifts, you come back. That's not a request."
"I understand," Juno said.
She went.
Vega watched her cross the breach, watched her feet find the exact places she had marked, watched her disappear into the dark of the compartment. The deck crew followed, one by one, their lights making thin pale cones in the dust. The ship groaned around them, and Vega stayed where she was, one hand on the wall, the other curled at her side, and waited.
It was twenty minutes. It was the longest twenty minutes of the night.
When the first figure came back through the breach, it was one of the deck crew, and he was carrying a child against his chest, a small girl with dark hair and a blanket pulled around her, and she was breathing, and she was alive. Behind him came another deck crew member with a boy, older, his head lolling, a field dressing at his temple, but his chest rose and fell. And behind them, last, came Juno, and with her, walking with the careful gait of a person who had decided to put one foot in front of the other until the work was done, a woman whose name was Halla, and who was saying something, over and over, a name, her daughter's name, and the daughter was already in the medic's arms, and the woman did not know it yet, and Juno was guiding her forward, and the woman's hand was on Juno's arm, and Juno was letting it be there.
Vega turned away. She had to. There was work. There was always, now, work.
She found Ren in the corridor outside the mess hall. He was leaning against the wall, his head tipped back, his eyes closed, and he looked, for the first time since she had known him, like a man who was tired in a way that sleep would not fix.
"Halla Cardew and her two children," she said. "Alive. Juno Bardin brought them out."
He opened his eyes. "The locksmith's sister."
"Yes."
"The locksmith himself?"
"In the mess hall. With the medic. He was asking about them every five minutes. I stopped counting after the third."
Vega leaned against the wall beside him. The metal was cool through her jacket, and the ship moved under them in that long, slow roll that she had stopped noticing and then started noticing again, and she let herself feel the weight of it, the particular weight of a vessel that was trying not to come apart.
"There is still one berth unaccounted for," she said. "On the lower port side. Three passengers. A man named Aldric Voss and two others whose names are on the manifest as companions."
"Voss." Ren turned the name over. "I know that name. He was a clerk in the harbor authority before the reorganization. Quiet sort. Kept to himself. If he had companions, they were not the sort he introduced."
"Then we look anyway," Vega said. "Everyone gets looked for. That's the rule now."
Ren studied her for a moment. "You're going to have to tell the Bardins that their berthmates are alive. You should do it yourself."
"I know."
"And you're going to have to decide what to do with the name you caught on the bridge."
Vega did not answer that. She pushed off the wall and walked toward the mess hall, where the lights were brighter and the air was warmer and Kit Bardin was sitting on a bench with a cup of something hot in his hands, and Juno was beside him, and Halla Cardew was on a cot with her daughter asleep against her chest, and the medic was moving between them, and the whole room smelled of dust and tea and the particular human smell of people who had decided, again, to keep going.
She had a name to give them, and a name to decide about, and a berth full of strangers to find, and the ship was still moving under her, and the storm was still pressing, and somewhere ahead of her there was a sister she had not yet reached.
She stepped into the light.
The mess hall swallowed her. Vega Maren stood in the doorway for one breath, letting the warmth settle into her cheeks, and took the measure of the room the way she had been trained to take the measure of archives: by what was missing, what was out of place, what wanted to be hidden.
Juno Bardin sat against the far wall with her knees drawn up, a compress pressed to her temple. Kit Bardin was pacing. Halla Cardew had stopped rocking. The medic had moved on. Nobody was looking at Vega, and that was how she knew they had been waiting for her.
She crossed the deck. Her boots found the boards without scraping. The smell of dust and tallow and boiled tea thickened as she moved through the low light, and beneath it the faint mineral tang of the hull plating cooling after the storm.
"The weight we have," she said, not sitting. "It is not finished."
Three faces lifted. Kit Bardin's eyes went sharp and uncertain in equal measure. Juno's stayed steady. Halla Cardew's did not lift at all, because she already knew.
"There is one berth left," Vega said. "Lower port. Three passengers. A man named Aldric Voss and two companions whose names are on the manifest but not in any registry I have seen."
"Aldric Voss," Juno said, quietly, as if turning a key in a lock she had not meant to open. "I know the name. He came to the shop once. Maybe twice. Polite. Paid in coin and asked questions about old mechanisms. Door locks, safe locks, pressure seals."
"You didn't mention him."
"He didn't seem like a man who wanted to be mentioned."
Vega noted the careful phrasing. She let it stand.
"If he is alive," Kit said, "then where is he?"
"That," Vega said, "is what we are about to find out."
She did not give them the second name. Not yet. She had spent the walk from the bridge deciding that, and the deciding had cost her something she would not name, and the name would wait in her pocket until she had earned the right to spend it.
"Stay with Halla," she told Juno. "Both of you."
Juno's mouth tightened. "We can help."
"You can. By being here when we come back."
Juno studied her. Then she nodded, once, and Kit sat down beside her as if his legs had decided for him, and Vega turned and went back into the corridor without looking at the faces she was leaving behind.
The lower port berth was three decks down, past the galley that was no longer a galley, past the hold that had been pressed into service as a sickroom, past a stretch of corridor where the deck plates had been pried loose and not replaced. She moved down the ladder first, Ren Tass above her, Yara Ondek below, and the three of them made a slow procession through the dim.
The berth door was closed.
It was not locked.
Vega set her hand on the handle and felt the cold run up her arm and into her shoulder. She pushed.
The room was small and dark and had not been opened since the storm. Air sat in it like water in a well. She counted the shapes by their breathing.
Three.
One large, slumped against the far wall. One smaller, curled on the lower bunk. One very still, on the floor, half under a locker that had shifted and not been righted.
Ren moved past her and crouched by the one on the floor. His hand went to the throat, then the wrist.
"Pulse," he said. "Faint."
Yara went to the large one. "This one is breathing."
Vega went to the smaller. A girl, perhaps twelve, her hair matted, her lips cracked, her eyes half open and watching without seeing. Vega knelt.
"Hello," she said. "My name is Vega Maren. Can you hear me?"
The girl did not answer. Her fingers twitched on the blanket.
Vega looked up. The three of them looked at each other across the dim.
"Get them up," Ren said, quietly.
It was not easy. The man on the floor was heavier than he looked, and he did not wake, and Ren had to drag him by the shoulders while Yara took the feet and Vega held the door. They got him into the corridor and laid him against the bulkhead, and then they went back for the large one, and then for the girl, and then Vega stood in the empty berth and looked at what was left.
Three packs. Two were sealed. One was open and half unpacked, as if someone had been interrupted in the middle of an act they had not meant to be interrupted in.
She went through the open one first. Clothing. A sealed tin of medical supplies she did not recognize. A folded square of oilskin, wrapped around something flat and heavy.
She unwrapped it on the floor.
It was a black box. Not the deep-sea kind she had seen on the Resolute, but smaller, older, of the kind that dock-side clerks used to keep logs when they did not want the logs to be official. She turned it over. The case was scuffed at the corners. The seal along the back had been pressed twice.
She pressed it a third time.
The lid gave. Inside, on a spindle, a thin ribbon of treated paper. She drew it out carefully and held it to the dim light from the corridor.
She read.
She read again.
Her hands were steady. Her face was not.
"Vega." Ren's voice, from the corridor. "We need you."
She rolled the ribbon back, wrapped it in the oilskin, put the oilskin in her coat, and left the berth. She did not lock it behind her. There was nothing left in it worth stealing, and she wanted the door open so that when she came back with questions, she could come back into a room that had not been sealed by anyone but her.
In the corridor Ren had the man from the floor sitting up against the bulkhead. His eyes were open now, unfocused, the pupils wrong. Yara had the large one propped against the wall, a canteen at his mouth. The girl was on Ren's back, her arms around his neck, her head against his shoulder, and she was awake and watching Vega with the patience of someone who had been watching for a long time.
"I'm Toma Vasquez," the man on the floor said. His voice was a ruin. "I was third officer on the Resolute. I was in the berth when they came."
"Who came?"
He closed his eyes. Opened them.
"I don't know. They wore ship's clothing. They had ship's keys. They came into our berth and they put us in the closet and they sealed the door from outside and they left."
"When?"
"Before the storm. Before the engines stopped. We heard the engines, and then we didn't."
"And you have been in there since."
He nodded, a small, defeated motion. "The girl kept us alive. She rationed the water. She knew how. She had done it before."
Vega looked at the girl. The girl looked back.
"What's your name?" Vega said.
"Petra," the girl said.
"How old are you?"
"Twelve."
"How did you know how to ration water?"
Petra considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. "Because I am twelve," she said, "and I have been on ships since I was six, and ships teach you."
Yara Ondek made a small sound. Vega did not look at her.
"Toma," Vega said. "Aldric Voss. Is he one of the two with you?"
Toma's face changed. "Voss is not with us. Voss was the one who opened the door for them."
The corridor was very quiet.
"He opened the door," Vega said.
"He let them in. He let them past the wardroom. He told them where the passengers were berthed. He took coin for it, I think. I heard him arguing about the price."
"And then?"
"And then they put us in the closet. And Voss went with them. And we never saw him again."
Vega stood very still. The oilskin rectangle pressed against her ribs, and inside it the ribbon pressed against her memory, and the ribbon said, in a clerk's hand she recognized, in a hand that had signed her sister's letters, that the Resolute had been boarded six hours before the attack. That the boarding had been quiet, and careful, and from inside.
She thought of Sable. She thought of the name she had caught on the bridge. She thought of how Aldric Voss had come to Juno's shop and asked about pressure seals, and how the Resolute's pressure seals had failed in the storm, and how the engines had stopped at the moment they had been designed not to stop.
She thought of how her sister had always been better at planning than at leaving a clean trail.
"Vega," Ren said. He was watching her. "What is it?"
"I need five minutes," she said. "Alone."
Ren hesitated. Then he nodded, and he and Yara gathered the survivors and moved them up the corridor toward the mess, and the girl Petra looked back once over Ren's shoulder with those steady eyes, and then they were gone, and Vega was alone in the dim with the hum of the hull and the smell of old air and the weight in her coat.
She took out the oilskin. She unrolled the ribbon. She read it again, from the beginning, and this time she read it aloud, in a voice so low it was barely a breath, and the words sounded different in her mouth than they had in her head.
The first entry was dated two days before the attack. It was signed with a clerk's initial and a cipher she had learned to recognize in another life. The cipher belonged to a woman who had once worked in the harbor authority and who had once, briefly, been Vega's sister's lover.
The entry described a quiet meeting in a private berth. It described the transfer of a key. It described the agreement that the key would be used to open the wardroom hatch from the inside, at a specific hour, and that in exchange a sum would be paid into an account in a port that did not exist on any official map.
The second entry was dated the morning of the attack. It described the opening of the hatch. It described four figures in ship's clothing moving down the corridor. It described, in the careful language of a clerk who understood what she was seeing, the disabling of the port engine's safety coupling by a pair of hands that knew the engine well.
The entry did not name Sable Maren.
It did not have to.
The third entry was a single line.
Forgive me. It was not meant to go this far.
Vega rolled the ribbon back. She wrapped it. She put it in her coat.
She stood in the corridor for a long time.
Then she went up.
She found Idris Quill in the captain's day-room, sitting where she had left him, his hands folded, his face the color of old paper. He looked up when she came in, and he saw something in her face that made him set his cup down without drinking from it.
"I have a question for you," she said.
He waited.
"If a clerk in the harbor authority were to keep a private record of meetings she had been asked to witness, and if she were to keep it in a black box rather than in the official archive, would that be the kind of record that could be brought before a magistrate?"
Idris considered the question with the care he gave to all questions.
"It depends," he said, "on the magistrate. It depends on the clerk. It depends on whether the record corroborates other evidence, and whether the other evidence corroborates the record."
"And if the record implicates a member of a noble house?"
"Then the magistrate will want to know who paid for the record, and who stands to gain from its production, and whether the record itself is genuine."
"And if the record is genuine?"
"Then the magistrate will want to know what the record says, and whether the person who kept it is willing to say it again in open court."
Vega set the oilskin on the table between them.
"Read it," she said.
Idris read it. His face did not change. His hands did not move.
When he was done, he set the ribbon down and looked at her.
"Where did you find this?"
"In the berth of a man who is not Aldric Voss."
"And the man who kept it?"
"Is on his way to the sickroom, with three others, including a girl of twelve who kept them alive in a closet for six days."
"Vega."
"Idris."
He folded his hands. He unfolded them.