Nessa looked up through the rain with one hand on the rim of the hatch.
"A customs launch called the Mercy Bell."
Boots struck iron below them.
Cassian caught Mara by the back of her coat and drove her upward. "Climb."
She went, not because she liked the order but because the first white beam had cut across the bottom of the shaft. Nessa seized Mara's wrist from above and hauled. Cassian followed as the hatch shuddered under a blow from beneath.
They came out behind a row of condemned net sheds where rain flattened the harbor into hammered gray. The passage cover lay beneath a broken sorting table, its boards silver with rot. Nessa dropped the table back into place. It would not stop the containment team. It might make them waste ten seconds.
Cassian counted three ways out. The quay to the east was exposed. The flood channel to the west had a locked grate and water climbing its bars. North lay a service lane between the sheds and the old iceworks, narrow enough to turn pursuit into single file.
He pointed north. Nessa was already moving.
Mara kept pace beside him, one hand clamped around the strap of her document case. Rain had pasted strands of black hair across her mouth. She tore them away without breaking stride.
"Mercy Bell," she said. "That vessel was dismantled eight years ago."
"Then this will be a short salvage job," Nessa called back.
A hatch cover crashed behind them.
Cassian heard Rusk's people spread by the rhythm of their boots: two into the lane, at least one toward the quay. Professional spacing. No shouted warnings. Containment, not arrest.
The service lane bent around the iceworks. Nessa vaulted a fallen pipe. Mara went over it badly, caught her toe, and pitched forward. Cassian took her weight at the waist before her palms hit the gravel. For half a second she was braced against him, breath hard and warm at his throat.
Then she planted both feet and pushed free. "I had it."
"The ground disagreed."
He expected the look. He did not expect her to reach back and tug his coat straight where it had twisted beneath his shoulder holster. One efficient pull. Her fingers brushed the old scar under his collar, then vanished.
"Your ground is argumentative," she said, and ran on.
The touch stayed there longer than it had any right to.
Nessa reached a corrugated gate set into the iceworks wall and produced a key from her sleeve.
"You carry keys to condemned buildings now?" Cassian asked.
"I carry keys to buildings whose owners have poor memories and worse locks."
The key turned. They slipped through, and Nessa locked the gate behind them just as the first containment officer rounded the bend. A shoulder struck the metal. The gate bowed inward.
Inside, the iceworks smelled of wet brick, old ammonia, and the black mineral stink of the tide. Their footsteps crossed a chamber where rusted hooks hung from ceiling rails. Nessa led them through a freezer door, down three steps, and into a loading bay open to a narrow canal.
A salvage skiff waited under the overhang. Its paint had once been red. The name Spite showed pale beneath newer black.
"Subtle," Mara said.
"The other one is called Tax Deduction. Get in."
Nessa jumped aboard and thumbed the ignition. The engine coughed once. Twice. Cassian looked back through the loading bay. The freezer door trembled in its frame.
Mara stepped into the skiff, turned, and held out a hand to him.
He could have made the distance without it. She knew that. Her hand remained extended, steady despite the rain and the noise behind them.
Cassian took it.
Her grip was dry only in the center of her palm. She braced as he came aboard, using her whole weight instead of pretending strength she did not have. The engine caught. Nessa cut the mooring line with a knife and shoved the throttle forward.
The Spite shot into the canal as the freezer door burst open.
No shots followed. That told Cassian more than bullets would have. Rusk's people could not risk a body in daylight, not with shift ferries already moving across the outer harbor. They wanted Mara's papers, Nessa's credential, and silence that could still be entered in a report as cooperation.
The canal narrowed between warehouse walls. Rainwater streamed from broken gutters in solid ropes. Nessa steered with one hand and pulled off her breathing hood with the other. Blood ran from a cut above her ear, bright against the shaved dark hair at her temple.
Mara opened her document case.
Cassian said, "Now is not an excellent time for an audit."
"Hold this." She gave him a folded packet of dry papers, took out a compact medical roll, and moved behind Nessa. "Head still."
"Buy me breakfast first."
Mara cleaned the cut while the skiff bounced through the canal chop. Nessa hissed and tried to duck away. Mara caught her jaw, turned her face back, and pressed gauze to the wound with careful, unyielding fingers.
Cassian watched the water. He also watched Mara's reflection in the instrument glass. She had nearly drowned ten minutes ago. Her father’s stolen clearance sat in Nessa's pocket. Breakwater officers were behind them, and Mara still wrapped the bandage twice, checked that it did not cover the ear, and tied it where the knot would not press against bone.
Documents, he thought, were not the only things she treated precisely.
"There," she said. "You may resume being evasive."
"Sweet talk gets expensive after dawn."
"Where is the Mercy Bell?"
Nessa's smile thinned. She steered them beneath a low bridge, waiting until the stone arch enclosed the engine noise. "Not where the registry says."
"The registry says it was cut apart at South Hook," Mara said. "The Authority received a disposal certificate, weight receipts, and photographs. My father signed the final customs release."
"Your father signed quite a lot of interesting things."
Mara's hand closed around the loose end of the bandage. Not hard. Just enough to make Nessa tilt her head away.
"Careful, auditor. That's attached."
"Answer her," Cassian said.
Nessa glanced at him over one shoulder. "You always did take the romance out of interrogation."
"Location."
The skiff emerged from beneath the bridge into the shelter of a disused lock basin. Nessa throttled down and let them drift behind two rotting dredge barges. Above the basin, cranes moved through fog along the live port, their warning bells softened by distance.
She killed the engine. Rain ticked against the deck.
"Pier Twelve," she said.
Cassian looked toward the southern harbor though warehouses blocked the view. Pier Twelve belonged to Vey Bonded Storage. It handled sealed cargo under private customs authority and sat inside the oldest security ring in Blackwater. He had walked it beside Rusk at fifteen, learning camera arcs and blind approaches. There were no blind approaches now. Cassian had removed them himself.
Mara sat on the narrow bench opposite Nessa. "There is no water deep enough beneath Pier Twelve to hide a launch."
"There is if the launch is under the pier, not beside it. Old construction caisson. Flooded after the east pilings shifted. Your father found a survey reference that never made it into the municipal plans."
"And you verified this?"
"I dove the intake three months before he hired me. Got as far as the outer plate. Military seal, six hinge dogs, and a cable alarm newer than the rust around it. Someone visits."
Cassian set Mara's dry papers beside her. "What was the Mercy Bell carrying when it supposedly went to scrap?"
Nessa rubbed rain from her mouth. "Edrin didn't say. He said there was a watertight evidence cylinder fixed beneath the chart table. My fee was for the cylinder, unopened. Half on agreement, half through those Thursday instructions."
"Which never appeared," Mara said.
"Not until last night."
Cassian went still.
Nessa reached inside her suit and brought out a strip of oilskin, folded into a square no larger than two fingers. The edges were damp, but the inner paper she unfolded was dry.
Mara did not reach for it. "Archive C held this?"
"Behind the fourth drawer. A mechanical drop releases when the credential enters at four ten. Empty every Thursday until this one."
"You said you found nothing."
"I said the room had been cleared. Different lie."
Cassian held out his hand. Nessa considered it, then gave Mara the paper instead.
Mara read without moving her lips. A pulse beat once at the base of her throat. She handed it to Cassian.
The message contained no greeting and no signature. Edrin Quill had written three lines in the compact block print used on customs seizure tags.
MERCY BELL CONFIRMED IN CAISSON 12.
RECOVER CYLINDER BEFORE TRUST VOTE.
DO NOT DELIVER TO ME.
Below the final line was a sequence of tide figures and a date.
Tomorrow.
Cassian read it again. The paper had waited eleven months to fall. That meant the mechanism had not been set by Edrin before his death, unless Edrin had known the exact Thursday on which Nessa would return after the archive flooded, Breakwater entered, and Mara began asking the right questions.
Mara took the note back and flattened it against the lid of her case. "Who loaded the message?"
Nessa looked past them toward Pier Twelve, hidden behind brick, fog, and the security system Cassian had designed.
From inside Mara's case came a soft electronic chirp.
The confidential notice of Cassian's exile, sealed in its evidence sleeve, had begun transmitting.