Cassian had the case out of Mara's hands before the second chirp.
She caught the handle and held on. "That contains my appointment order, three warrants, and the only copy of a dead man's route amendment."
"It also contains a transmitter."
"Your command of the obvious remains excellent."
The skiff rolled beneath them as a tug passed beyond the iceworks wall. Black water slapped the pilings. Nessa killed the cabin lamp, leaving the instrument panel to paint her face in weak green lines.
The chirp came again.
Cassian put two fingers against the evidence sleeve. A vibration answered, too fine for the cheap locator tags used by cargo thieves. This was built into the seal itself. He turned the sleeve toward the panel light and saw a filament under the black wax: thin as hair, arranged in three hooked strokes.
His thumb stopped over it.
Mara watched his hand. "You recognize that."
"Yes."
"How unfortunate for your commitment to mystery."
Nessa leaned across the wheel. "Can we conduct the interrogation after we stop telling half the harbor where to shoot?"
Cassian looked through the salt-streaked windscreen. The channel outside the iceworks remained empty, but fog had drawn close around the building, swallowing crane lights and turning every engine note into something near.
"Lead box," he said.
Nessa pointed below the bench. "Flare locker."
He opened it. Fiberglass.
"Metal."
"You arrived on a salvage boat, Ash. We keep metal where it can rust expensively."
Mara released the handle and opened the case. Her movements were exact even with the deck shifting: latch, strap, sleeve. She lifted the notice by its edges.
The chirp sharpened.
Cassian caught her wrist before she could peel the seal.
Her skin was cold from the archive water. Her pulse beat once beneath his fingers, hard and even.
"Pressure filament," he said. "Break it and the signal changes."
"To what?"
"Distress."
"Whose?"
He let go. The pale marks his fingers had left vanished as she flexed her hand.
"Mine."
Nessa made a low sound. "That is either very sweet or catastrophically stupid. With Veys, I never know until the bill arrives."
Cassian took the flare locker apart with the screwdriver from Nessa's console kit. Four screws, two stripped. Mara braced it between her boots without being asked, shifting her grip each time the skiff rolled so the casing stayed level. She did not crowd his hands. She watched the tool, anticipated the torque, and moved before he had to tell her.
Most people tried to help by reaching into the work.
Mara made room for it.
He found himself noticing the small cut along her thumb, washed clean by floodwater and opened again by the case latch. He disliked that he noticed it. He disliked more that he knew where Nessa kept the medical kit.
The locker had a thin steel heat shield behind its flare rack. Cassian freed it and folded the edges inward with pliers.
"That will leak," Mara said.
"Yes."
"You sound pleased."
"I want it to."
He wrapped the sleeve in an oilcloth, placed it inside the steel, and left a gap no wider than a coin. The chirp dulled but did not stop.
Nessa peered at the arrangement. "A bad box on purpose. Your grandmother would hate it."
"She hates waste."
"She once had a dining table burned because a minister spilled white wine on it."
"The minister lied about the year."
Mara's gaze moved between them. "You have very detailed opinions about Iona Vey's furniture, Mr. Vale."
A propeller thudded in the channel.
Not a tug. Too light, running fast at low throttle.
Cassian shut the improvised box and held it near the stern. The filament's pulse trembled through the steel in a pattern he had not felt in years: three brief transmissions, a pause, then one sustained call.
Shepherd protocol.
He had written the field procedure at twenty-three, after a protection officer vanished inside a bonded warehouse. The locator was meant for personnel working under compromised identities. Its beacon slept until exposed to an authenticated Breakwater scan, then reported position without alerting the person carrying it.
The chirp was not the transmitter starting.
It was the transmitter acknowledging that it had been found.
"Down," he said.
Mara lowered herself at once. Nessa did not. Cassian hooked the back of her coat and dragged her below the windscreen as a white search beam passed over the roof.
It paused on the skiff's mast.
Nessa whispered, "Buy me dinner before you wrinkle the coat."
"Invoice me."
"You are famously insolvent."
The patrol launch came through the fog thirty yards off, black hull, no running lights. Breakwater Authority. Two figures stood behind the armored screen. A third held the search lamp.
A loudspeaker cracked. "Salvage vessel, identify and prepare for boarding."
Nessa reached for the ignition.
Cassian covered her hand. "Not yet."
Mara crouched beside the open case, one palm pressed over the loose documents. "They know the vessel."
"They know the signal."
"Distinction without comfort."
The beam swept back. Cassian lifted the steel box above the gunwale for one pulse, then dropped it into a coil of line.
"When they turn," he said, "start the engine and take the east cut."
Nessa looked at the box, then at the narrow channel under the collapsed loading bridge. "That cut has six feet of clearance at low tide."
"Seven now."
"The mast is eight."
"Then we won't have a mast."
Her grin showed briefly in the dark. "There you are."
Cassian tied the coil with a running hitch and fed the free end through the stern cleat. Mara shifted close enough to shield the knot from the search beam with her body. The light whitened the damp shoulder of her coat. She did not look toward it.
That steadiness was rarer than courage. Courage wanted witnesses. Mara gave attention only to the task in front of her, as if danger had failed to earn a place in the ledger.
He tightened the hitch.
"What happens when they scan again?" she asked.
"They'll get a stronger return."
"From us."
"For six seconds."
The patrol launch turned broadside. Its bow wake struck the skiff, pitching the stern upward. Nessa started the engine. Cassian kicked the coil overboard.
The weighted line sank. The steel box skipped once, vanished, then pulled taut behind them.
Nessa drove the throttle forward.
The skiff lunged beneath the loading bridge. Rusted crossbars rushed at the windscreen. Cassian seized Mara around the waist and took her down as the mast struck with a crack that shook the hull. Wood and antenna wire tore away overhead.
The search beam swung after them, caught the floating wreckage, then snapped back toward the signal dragging through the water.
Six seconds.
Cassian cut the line.
The box continued with the current toward the western flood channel while Nessa drove east, engine screaming between stone walls. Behind them, the patrol launch accelerated after the beacon.
Mara's shoulder pressed beneath Cassian's chest. One of her hands had closed in his coat, not clutching but anchoring him against the deck. He could feel the shape of each knuckle.
The bridge passed.
He moved away first.
She sat up and smoothed the front of her coat. "Your methods are expensive."
Nessa glanced at the broken mast dragging from one cable. "My methods have invoices. His have funerals."
"No one died," Cassian said.
"Give the mast a minute."
They entered a drain channel barely wider than the skiff. Brick walls rose on both sides, wet with tide marks. Nessa throttled down and steered beneath old pipes while the patrol engine faded westward.
Mara collected the papers from the deck. She checked each page, squared the corners, and returned them to the case. The exile notice was gone with the box. She left its empty evidence sleeve on top.
"The seal was not part of my office's packaging," she said.
Cassian wiped rust from the screwdriver. "No."
"It was on the notice when the courier delivered it."
"Yes."
"The courier wore Breakwater gray."
Nessa's hands stilled on the wheel for half a breath.
Mara looked at Cassian. "You said the filament carried your distress signal. That was imprecise."
"It carried a protection credential."
"Whose?"
The channel bent beneath a warehouse, plunging them into a darkness broken only by the green panel glow. Water dripped from overhead beams. Each drop struck the cabin roof with the patience of a clock.
Cassian could give her the narrow truth. The device belonged to a system. The system predated her appointment. Breakwater used it on protected personnel. All correct. All shaped to keep his own hands out of view.
Mara waited. She had stopped demanding answers loudly. That was worse. She simply left an empty space and let a lie decide whether to enter it.
"I designed the protocol," he said.
Nessa exhaled through her teeth.
Mara did not move. "Ash Vale designed a covert Breakwater locator."
"No."
The word struck the low cabin ceiling.
Cassian set the screwdriver beside the console. He aligned it with the edge because his hand required a task and there was none left.
"Cassian Vey did."
Only the engine spoke for several seconds.
Mara folded the empty evidence sleeve once. The stiff material resisted, then creased under her thumbnail.
"I wondered how long you intended to make me prove it," she said.
Nessa looked from one to the other. "This feels private, and I am trapped in a boat six feet wide, so either kiss or stab each other with consideration."
Mara ignored her. "The locator woke when we reached the archive?"
"Earlier, possibly. An authenticated scanner had to challenge it."
"And every Breakwater scanner reports to whom?"
Cassian looked at the empty sleeve in her hand.
The answer had a measured voice and a habit of calling coercion procedure.
"Head command," he said.
"Tobias Rusk."
He did not correct her.
Mara placed the folded sleeve in her pocket. Her fingers lingered there, pressed flat against the evidence of what he had withheld. "So Rusk knew where I was throughout the inspection. He knew when the route changed. He knew when we entered House Nine."
"The system would have shown movement and scan points. Not conversations."
"How mercifully limited."
"Mara."
"Do not use my name to make the next omission sound intimate."
Nessa turned the skiff through the final bend. Gray morning opened ahead, the harbor spread under fog and crane shadows. Pier Twelve stood across the water, its bonded warehouses sealed behind fences and floodlights.
Cassian watched Mara fasten the case. She tested both latches twice. When she lifted it, she kept it on the side away from him.
Across the harbor, every floodlight at Pier Twelve came on at once.
Then the great doors of Vey Bonded Storage began to open.