Pell looked past him to the boat.
"The registered work."
The bow link opened another finger's width.
Garran moved before the chain could decide whether it was iron or a legal opinion. He caught the hauling line from the landing post, took one turn around his forearm, and planted his boots against the wet curb.
Practical Mercy pulled like a vessel twice her weight. Her stern swung toward the pilings. The engine was cold, the tide was wrong, and no ordinary strain should have moved her more than three inches.
She moved four.
"Tamsin," Garran said. "Brake pin."
"Already missing."
"Spare."
"The spare is in the brake housing, where brake pins with self-respect live."
She went over the rail headfirst.
Lark caught the back of Tamsin's belt with one hand and arrested her halfway to the deck. With the other, she laid her spear flat across the landing so its steel head could not score Garran's planks. Then she lowered Tamsin the remaining distance.
It was the care with the spear that fixed in Garran's mind. Lark had a failing chain, an armed inspector, green fire under her boots, and a mechanic trying to dive into a boat. She still protected the deck.
He would have preferred not to notice.
Pell remained outside the chalk boundary Lark had drawn for the inspection. Her two Reed officers stood behind her with hooked poles grounded at their right feet. Their coats were dry despite the spray.
"Interference with return is chargeable by the hour," Pell said.
"Send an invoice," Garran said.
"It will attach to the claim."
"Then write legibly."
The chain gave a high, thin squeal.
Lark stepped beside Garran and inspected the opening link. She did not touch it. "The mark is applying workshop draw through the vessel's registration."
"The vessel is registered here."
"Her hull is."
Below them, a locker slammed. Tamsin swore at three different generations of Reed machinists, including one who had been dead for ninety years.
Garran looked at the brass strip. CARRIER. CUSTODIAN. LIABLE. Each word burned with the green of river water over copper.
"A boat isn't workshop output," he said.
Pell took the altered receipt from her case. She held it by both edges, as if greasy fingers were the only dishonesty likely to damage it. "Any registered work transported under an active return claim becomes part of the carrier's accountable body. If the carrier contains work entered by the summoned hand, Reed law recognizes the whole mechanism."
"Contains," Garran repeated.
The stern struck a piling. Oak boomed across the harbor.
"Found it," Tamsin called.
"The pin?"
"The reason we're being murdered by stationery."
Garran handed the hauling line to Lark. She took it without shifting her stance, wrapped it twice around the spear shaft, and used the crossguard as a brake. It was a poor use for a cultivation weapon and exactly the right use for a straight length of good ash.
"You have thirty seconds," she told him. "After that, the shaft splits or your landing post does."
"The post was cheaper."
"Twenty-nine."
He climbed aboard.
Practical Mercy's deck canted under the sideways draw. Garran crossed it with one hand on the cabin roof and dropped through the engine hatch. The air below smelled of old bilge, hot brass, and the sharp mineral tang of Reed law. Tamsin lay on her back beneath the reduction gear, boots kicking against a toolbox she had been told six times not to leave there.
She had opened the lower housing. Green light pulsed between the gear teeth.
"Don't touch the teeth," she said.
"I trained you better than that."
"You trained me to ask whether touching them was billable."
She pushed herself out. Blood striped two knuckles where the housing had taken skin. In her other hand she held a narrow bronze plate gone black around its rivet holes.
Garran knew every plate in the engine room. He knew which ones had been cut from navy salvage, which had come dear from Saltmere, and which bore Tamsin's cramped corrections to his measurements. He did not know this one.
A hooked river had been stamped into its back.
Under the hook, in characters no wider than fish bones, was a registry entry.
TAMSIN REED. FIRST INDEPENDENT WORK. LOAD-BEARING KEEL GOVERNOR.
The words after it had been hammered almost flat.
Garran tilted the plate toward the green light.
PROPERTY SHARE: ONE FIFTH.
Above them, Lark called, "Twenty seconds."
Tamsin reached for the plate. Garran closed his hand around it.
"When?" he asked.
"The winter you cracked the old governor backing into South Spit."
"I did not crack it."
"You reversed under full side load with ice in the race. The metal expressed an opinion."
"When did you enter the share?"
She looked at the open housing instead of him. "When I made the replacement."
"I paid you for the replacement."
"You paid me three silver and a pair of boots that leaked through both soles."
"They leaked through one sole when I gave them to you."
"Capital appreciation."
The hull shuddered. A wrench walked off the shelf and struck the deck between them.
"Twelve seconds," Lark called.
Garran read the plate again. A keel governor did not touch the keel. The name belonged to older ferry engines, when one assembly had governed both thrust and steering load. The part Tamsin had built was no larger than his palm, but without it Practical Mercy would tear her own stern apart in a hard turn.
Load-bearing under Reed law did not mean weight. It meant dependence.
"You registered a fifth of my boat to yourself."
"Our boat," Tamsin said. "According to that."
"Without telling me."
"You'd have said no."
"Yes."
"Efficient, then."
Her chin was lifted. Her bleeding hand had closed against her thigh, leaving a dark print on the canvas. Garran saw the packed tool roll under her bunk, the waxed emergency matches in the vent grille, the narrow gap where she kept enough coin for passage to any island that would not ask her birth name.
He had known about all three for months. Knowing was not the same as asking.
The engine housing flared green. Tamsin flinched from it.
Garran fitted the plate back over the opening.
"What are you doing?"
"Keeping the shaft aligned."
"It makes the claim hold the whole boat."
"Removing it under load shears six teeth and bends the reduction shaft. Forty-two silver used, seventy new, plus towing."
"The Reed draw is going to take her."
"It can take her without an engine rebuild."
He set the first rivet through by hand.
Tamsin stared at him. "You heard the part where I stole a fifth?"
"Misappropriated. Theft requires you to remove something."
"That's your objection?"
"No. My objection requires more time than the chain has. Hold the plate."
She held it.
He drove the rivet with three blows. On the second, the boat lurched hard enough to throw his shoulder into the housing. On the third, the green light ran out from beneath the plate and sank into the ribs of the hull.
Practical Mercy answered with a deep wooden groan.
Then the bow chain broke.
The sound reached through the deck as a flat iron crack. The boat sprang away from the landing. Garran caught the ladder with one hand. Tamsin caught Garran by the back of his coat, which was brave, useless, and nearly pulled both of them into the bilge.
Outside, Lark's spear rang against stone.
Garran climbed until his head cleared the hatch. Practical Mercy had drifted six feet into black water and was still moving, bow turning east. The broken chain dragged from her hawse in a stream of sparks. Green lines had spread along every seam Tamsin had repaired.
Lark stood at the edge of the landing with the hauling line around her waist. Her boots slid on the wet boards. One Reed officer had hooked his pole through the line and was trying to lever it from her hands.
She reversed her grip and drove the butt of her spear into his wrist.
No flare of cultivation. No invoked debt. Just ash, leverage, and a precise understanding of the small bones of the hand.
The officer dropped the pole.
"Inspection remains nonviolent," Lark said.
He cradled his wrist. "You struck me."
"Then you should have less difficulty identifying the violence if it begins."
Pell raised two fingers.
The green fire on Practical Mercy brightened. The boat's bow corrected eastward by another degree.
Toward Reed Anchorage.
Garran looked at the silent engine controls. Throttle closed. Clutch open. Rudder centered. Yet water boiled astern in short, regular strokes, as though an invisible workshop crew hauled the vessel along a submerged chain.
"Tamsin," he said. "Can you disengage the governor?"
She emerged beside him, pale beneath the engine grime. "Not without disengaging the stern."
"Estimate."
"Three minutes before we clear the harbor mouth. After that the return road catches the hull and we go wherever the receipt says."
Pell lifted her voice across the widening gap. "Inspector and officers will board the accountable carrier. Refusal will be entered as flight."
"Your inspection scope ended at the landing," Lark called.
"The landing is no longer where the inspected property stands."
"Convenient interpretations remain interpretations."
"And broken chains remain evidence."
Garran looked from the drifting boat to the line around Lark's waist. The landing post had split down one side. She had looped the rope through the crack to gain another turn. It would hold perhaps a minute. Her left sleeve was torn where the line had burned through the cloth, and still she had laid a folded scrap of canvas beneath the rope so the post would not chew it apart.
Always preserving the thing that would be needed next.
He could not stop looking at that scrap of canvas.
"Let go," he told her.
"No."
"The post is failing."
"I assessed it."
"Your estimate?"
"Longer than yours."
Pell stepped to the edge. "Examiner Fen, the carrier is under lawful return. If you remain attached, Reed Anchorage may classify you as accompanying surety."
Lark glanced at the rope around her waist.
Garran knew what she would do half a breath before she did it, because she looked down at the spear she had protected from his deck, then across at Tamsin's bloodied hand.
She pulled the knot tighter.
"Record that I dispute the classification," she said.
The landing post tore free.
Lark vanished over the edge with it.
Garran reached across the rail. His shoulder struck wood. His fingers closed around her wrist as the line snapped taut beneath the water, and Practical Mercy turned her bow toward the open sea.