Nessa snapped the salvage reader shut.
Above them, the abandoned coal conveyor groaned in the wind. Rust sifted from its ribs and pattered across the skiff's canopy. Beyond the pilings, a Breakwater launch moved through the fog with its lamps hooded, showing only two pale seams where the shutters failed to meet.
Cassian counted the engine strokes. Slow. Searching.
Mara drew the evidence cylinder toward her with her uninjured hand. The other rested against her coat, wrapped in a strip torn from Nessa's undershirt. The cloth had gone dark where the blisters had opened.
"We need the certificate beneath the authority code," she said. "Not the display summary."
"You need a surgeon," Cassian said.
"Will the surgeon have a decryption cradle?"
"Probably not."
"Then I admire your concern and reject its relevance."
Nessa crouched at the stern, one hand on the throttle and the other holding a boat hook across her knees. "Do either of you flirt in a way that doesn't make the room colder?"
"This isn't a room," Cassian said.
"There he is."
The patrol launch passed the mouth of the pilings. Its wake pressed black water against the skiff's hull. Mara did not look toward it. She had opened her case and was arranging the reader leads with her left hand, each cable laid parallel despite the tremor in her fingers.
Cassian watched her use her teeth to pull a connector cap free.
Twenty minutes earlier she had kept Nessa's dying engine alive by closing her bare hand around a split ignition bridge. She had known what the current would do. She had done it before either of them could stop her, then warned Nessa about the fuel leak while the smell of her own burned skin filled the canopy.
He could not stop seeing the calm precision of it. Not recklessness. A decision made cleanly and paid for at once.
It was the kind of act he had been trained to recognize in armed men. It looked different in her.
"There is an old tide-accounting station under the east abutment," he said. "It was disconnected when the bonded warehouses changed insurers. The registry terminal should still have a physical certificate socket."
Mara glanced up. "Should?"
"The port dislikes removing anything it may later charge rent for."
Nessa looked past him toward the fog. "East abutment has no water approach at low tide. Mud, broken glass, and all the delightful waste of a century's commerce."
"We walk from here."
"And leave my boat tied beneath a search lane?"
The launch engine changed pitch.
Cassian leaned out far enough to see its hooded lamps turning back toward them.
"We don't leave it tied," he said.
Nessa followed his gaze. For once, no answer came quickly.
Her skiff was patched in seven kinds of metal. The port registration had been painted over twice, and the salvage winch was older than any of them. She had slept under its canopy, bled into its bilge, and spent three years buying it from a lender who charged interest by the tide.
She set the boat hook down.
"I hate wealthy men," she said. "Even the temporary poor ones."
They stripped what they could carry. Nessa opened the fuel cock, jammed the throttle just above idle, and looped a line through the wheel so the skiff would turn west once it cleared the pilings. She added a work lamp beneath the canopy and covered it with Mara's spare coat.
From a distance, it would look like a seated passenger.
Nessa's hand remained on the gunwale.
"When this is over," she told Cassian, "you owe me a boat."
"I currently owe the chandlery three weeks' rent."
"Then steal me a good one. Personal growth can wait."
She shoved the skiff into the channel.
Its patched hull slipped from beneath the conveyor and carried its false passenger into the fog. The patrol launch accelerated after it. Nessa watched until both engines faded westward, then turned toward the mud without looking at either of them.
They climbed down a ladder furred with salt and crossed the exposed harbor bed. Mud pulled at Cassian's boots. Broken crockery and old shell casings showed in the weak light from Nessa's hand lamp. Mara walked between them, the cylinder under her coat, her injured hand held rigid against her ribs.
At the east abutment, Cassian found the iron door behind a curtain of bladderweed. Its lock had seized halfway open years ago. He put his shoulder against it and felt the frame protest through bone.
Mara stepped beside him.
"Don't," he said.
"Your leverage is poor."
"Your hand is cooked."
"Only one of them."
She braced her boot against the stone and pulled the lower edge while he drove upward. The door tore free with a shriek that rolled beneath the bridge.
They waited.
No engines turned toward them.
Inside, the tide station smelled of damp paper and dead wiring. Brass measuring drums lined one wall, their paper rolls freckled with mold. The registry terminal sat behind a clerk's grille with a glass certificate socket beneath its screen.
Nessa swept her lamp over it. "No power."
Cassian opened the lower panel. The emergency battery had swollen in its housing, but the hand-crank generator beside it still moved. He disconnected the battery and turned the crank. The terminal flickered once, displaying a white line across the black screen.
"Keep it above forty revolutions," he said.
Nessa stared at him. "I gave up a boat and now I've joined a mill."
"Consistent motion will help with the grief."
She began cranking.
Mara inserted the evidence cylinder into the socket. The terminal clicked, considered the seal, and printed three lines in dim green letters.
ROOT AUTHORITY: CV-01
DERIVED MASTER: PELL-D7
VALIDATION RECEIPT: SEALED
"Open the receipt," Mara said.
Cassian reached for the keys. Mara's left hand covered them first.
"Will this transmit?"
"The station is disconnected."
"That was not the question."
He looked at the cable vanishing into the wall. Old copper. No carrier light. No local relay he could see.
"It may record the attempt in the cylinder. If Breakwater recovers it, they'll know we reached the receipt."
"If Breakwater recovers it, the distinction will be academic."
He entered the archival command. The machine requested an auditor credential. Mara produced a narrow metal seal from inside her case and fitted it to the keyboard slot.
Her hand slipped while she turned it.
Cassian caught her wrist before the burned palm struck the grille. Heat pulsed through the wet cloth. She went still, not leaning into him, not pulling away. Her breath touched the open collar of his coat.
"Release me," she said.
He did.
She tightened the seal with her left hand.
The receipt opened.
Lines of certificate data filled the screen too quickly to read. Cassian stopped the scroll and worked backward through the issuance record. Creation date. Permissions. Root lineage. The system treated the Pell key as legitimate, not copied and not forced. Whoever had made it had not broken Cassian's authority.
They had used it correctly.
Mara bent closer to the screen. "There. Validation class."
Cassian read the field.
LIVE HOLDER CONFIRMATION.
The crank slowed.
"Nessa," he said.
"My arm is falling off."
"Faster."
She swore and drove the handle around. The letters brightened.
Mara navigated to the attached proof. A diagram appeared: a hand laid over a rectangular reader, pale lines branching through the palm and wrist.
"Vein confirmation," she said.
"Executive roots require it for an unrestricted derivative."
"Can it be reconstructed from a medical scan?"
"Not with this validation class. The reader measures circulation and temperature."
Nessa stopped making jokes.
Mara's gaze remained on the diagram. "Then you authorized Pell's key in person."
"No."
The word landed harder than he intended.
She waited. She was good at that. Silence in her hands became an instrument with a fine edge.
Cassian searched the receipt for a terminal location. The field had been purged. The operator identity was masked by his own root certificate. Only the validation timestamp remained.
He knew the date.
Rain against high windows. White infirmary lights. Tobias Rusk telling him that a training blade had gone beneath the vest because he had watched the attacker's shoulder instead of his empty hand.
Cassian had taken eleven stitches along his ribs. The medic had given him a sedative when the muscle began to spasm. He remembered signing the injury report. He remembered Tobias steadying the board beneath his hand.
He did not remember leaving the infirmary.
"Where were you?" Mara asked.
He gave her the date before he could decide whether to withhold it.
"Breakwater training infirmary. Injured. Sedated."
Nessa's grip tightened on the crank. "Who had access?"
"Medical staff. Senior command."
"Rusk?"
Cassian looked at the branching image of his veins.
"He brought me in."
The terminal emitted a warning tone. Nessa had begun to slow again, but Cassian saw the change in the lower corner of the display before the power dimmed.
CARRIER DETECTED.
The old copper line had found a network.
Mara pulled her audit seal free. Cassian seized the cylinder, but the socket locked around it with a mechanical clack.
"Authentication cycle," Mara said. "It won't release until completion."
"How long?"
"Fifty seconds."
From beyond the iron door came the low vibration of an engine crossing the east bridge.
Nessa cranked harder. "That boat was supposed to buy us ten minutes."
"It did," Cassian said.
A second engine answered from the harbor bed.
Mara looked at the cylinder, then at her wrapped hand. Before Cassian understood her intention, she tore the cloth away and pressed her blistered palm flat against the hot release plate beside the socket.
Her face emptied. The terminal counted down.
Cassian reached for her wrist.
"Don't," she said, and this time he obeyed.
The lock opened at twelve seconds instead of fifty. Mara ripped the cylinder free, leaving a wet print across the brass. Nessa abandoned the crank. Darkness swallowed the room.
Cassian guided them toward a narrow maintenance stair at the rear. Behind them, light entered through the broken iron door in thin white bars.
Someone outside called his borrowed name.
"Ash Vale."
Not Cassian.
Ash.
The voice was measured, patient, and close enough that Cassian could hear the rain beading on Tobias Rusk's coat.
Mara stopped one step above him. Her unwrapped hand hung at her side, blood and clear fluid slipping from her fingertips onto the stone.
Cassian looked back toward the dark terminal, where the last ghost of the vein diagram remained on the glass.
Who had held his hand while they stole his name?